End of Year Party on 30 December

On 30 December we will be celebrating another successful year at CLS and prsenting some of our outstanding students with prizes. We'll also have songs and games and cake. We'll be sure to post pictures here after the event.

New Volunteer Guidelines booklet

Lorna and Ruxi did a wonderful job preparing a document for us to hand out to new volunteers. You can review it at:

http://www.chumkriellanguageschool.com/documents/volunteer_guidelines.pdf

CLS Football Team

The CLS football team is back up and running and preparing for a competition in January. More details to follow soon.

Lights

The lighting in Mr Rekha's class has always been a problem and more and more he has been finding it difficult to read from the text book during the 6pm-7pm class. Although it is inexpensive to install an extra light, the recurring cost of the extra electricity has been a big issue. At our recent monthly meeting we identified this as a priority problem.

We are very grateful to a friend who made a donation recently that has allowed us set aside funds to cover an additional light in Rekha's room plus the electricity for at least a year.

August monthly meeting

The minutes from our August meeting have now been published at:

http://www.chumkriellanguageschool.com/minutes/staff/

The focus at this meeting was on improving teaching quality and relevelling some classes was identified as a priority.

Study Trip

At CLS we want to encourage the children to feel confident about speaking English. Mr Rekha and Mr Sandy wanted to try a Study Trip with some of the older children. We took a tuk-tuk to Kep, went for coffee, walked on the pier, had a seafood lunch and played football on the beach. We gave the children clip boards to write down their observations and they will report back to their class tomorrow.

The trip was very succesful but quite expensive relatively. We hope that in future visitors might like to sponsor a study trip and come along with us.

Here are some pictures of our day out.

















The children boght Mr Rekha and Mr Sandy some gifts as a thank you.

Rainy Season

The rainy season in Cambodia presents us with particular challenges. It is the state school holidays and many students must help their families to plant rice. When the rain is particularly bad it is difficult for the students to get to school. Furthermore, the rain on the tin roofs in the classrooms makes it impossible to be heard at times. Although we produce handouts and exercises to use when the rain comes on really hard there is a cost involved. We also find that with the reduced attendance the income for the school is limited and there is no surplus to provide the small prizes for the best improved students at the end of each month. We would also like to provide the Scholarship Class kids with appropriate school bags for their books as most bring their books to school in flimsy plastic bags which tear and their books get wet.

Teacher Training

All our teachers understand the need to be innovative in the classroom and we encourage them to improve their skills. We recently held an interactive workshop on Interactive Classroom Activities (Many thanks Amanda !) and this was enjoyed by all.

Joe from the Peace Corps has invited our teachers to join sessions he is giving on English Teaching Methods and a Grammar master class. Joe is an experienced teacher and these sessions are very valuable and will improve our skills and knowledge. Today we started looking at the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach. Here are some pictures from today's class.

Classroom Rules/Team Points

At our monthly meeting in May (minutes at http://www.chumkriellanguageschool.com/minutes/staff/may-2007.html) we determined that student behavior, particularly in some of the younger classes was a concern. We were fortunate to have some experienced volunteers to give advice and we held workshops on reinforcing classroom rules and introducing a Team Points system. This has been very successful and we see significant improvement in student attention and behavior.

Home Visits

Through some generous donations by friends in the UK we have been able to provide petrol payments to allow the teachers to undertake home visits. This is really important for the school as it allows us to get feedback from parents and also promote our school in the local community. Here are some pictures from last Saturday when Mr Rekha visited some of his students with Sandy.












On Monday, our volunteer Richard made some home visits to the Scholarship Class along with Mr Thy. Here are some photos of the families.