One of the things that kept coming up last week was an objection to the games because the classrooms were so packed. But as you saw in the videos for most of the schools it was a bit of an excuse. However today we had so many kids packed in one tiny room!

Just looking at the classrooms you’d never think much learning would ever go on. But they had some of the best kids this week!

Kindergarten were doing the songs with the CD player and loving it. Other kids were quite happy mixing up Doctor Doctor and Make a Face to come up with sentences like “My eye hurts” etc. Elementary had no problem with the What are you doing? song and the class 5 kids aced everything including all the phonics and the What’s your favourite? game.

The reason they were so good? Two very passionate members of the team. One is based in the office and has spent so much time helping, training and supporting the teachers that she has taken the training we gave and built and built and built on it. The other person is a teacher in the school who really stood out in the training and is now in charge of a whole group of classes and is doing so well with them. You both know who you are so thank you so much you’ve been doing amazing work!

If you have any people like this in your school, try giving them some more responsibilities for helping other teachers and see them fly!

We also had some international visitors from a very well known organisation that I’m not allowed to mention. But they were talking about the private schools for the poor i.e. these schools, and comparing them with the government schools, and why so many very low income parents choose to pay over going to free public schools. The best line they said was “What does it say for the product the government schools have when they can’t even give it away for free?” Indeed.

I was also really happy at today’s school because the teachers had all been using the teaching guide videos. There are so many teachers who just ignore the instructions and just try and teach how they think it should go and just fail miserably. But today I asked the teachers to teach a lesson they hadn’t done, to which the reply was “But we haven’t studied how to teach it, we have to watch the video first” which was a very professional attitude to take. Apparently she makes all the other teachers watch them before doing any lessons!

Then we had another school just before lunch. Again they were really good. And I was really impressed with the kids’ lunches, it looked so nice! It will be great when they start moving on to the projects.

Anyone want to do the school lunch project with our kids in India?