Big Sister Mouse

ວັນນີ້ພານັກຮຽນ ທັດສະນະສຶກສາ ທີ່ສວນ ສະຕໍແບຣີ...

Every weekday, anywhere from one to a dozen foreign visitors come to help students practice English. We keep them busy, with a a brief but high-energy visit to the pre-schoolers, then more time with young adults and primary-school students. Please keep us in mind if you visit Luang Prabang, we’re eager to have more visitors!

When we built our primary school last year, we had to carve out a flat area from a hillside and some of the land was still settling, so we had only enough solid ground to build 4 rooms. That was enough for this year, now we’re putting up two more rooms so that we can have grade 5, plus a library, office, and storage room in the 2018-19 school year.

We bought a kilogram of buffalo ricotta cheese during our Dairy Farm visit, then combined it with fresh basil, tomatoes and baguettes to make a treat that was a new experience for all of our students.

Should women have more decision-making responsibilities in the family? For our young-adult program, we ask students to select a question and debate it. We’ve started with guidelines and questions from the U.K.’s DebateMate program, which we greatly adapted for Laos where often there’s no way for students to research a subject, so students have to compose arguments from their own experience. Here, the Affirmative argued, “Yes, because men drink too much.” We leave it to you to guess which student took which side.

At the beginning of February, with unanimous support from children and parents, we extended the school day by an hour, so it now ends at 5:00 instead of 4:00. The extra hour is used for activities that are enjoyable, but also benefit kids. (And those who need or wish to leave earlier for any reason are free to do so.) One popular activity is dance. And a VERY popular dance is The Chicken Dance. Visitors who come to help with English practice are happy to dance along.

On Valentine’s Day, twenty of our students visited the new Laos Buffalo Dairy Farm. The farm rents buffalos from farmers, milks them twice daily, and processes the milk into cheese and yogurt. Our young adult students are from rural areas and generally grew up around farm animals; many of your primary school children don’t have that experience.

Some of this year’s new students are already reading simple books; others have progressed more slowly, and we’re adding several new activities to see what helps them. This is the “Word Race.” We have three teams, with three children per team, and we set out some large letters (not visible in this photo). Each team is assigned a 3-letter word, and players race out, one at a time, to get the letter they need.

The Lao and Thai alphabets are closely related, but Thai has an extra 20 consonants and most have somewhat different shapes. In addition, while most words shared by the two languages, many of the most common words are not. So a typical high school student cannot read Thai. But it’s a useful skill Students who attended our school last year, and have good reading skills now, have been learning Thai during their afternoon reading period.

PlaygroundMovedUp
Our playground equipment was near the road, but for safety reasons we decided to relocated it. Now it’s outside our new school.