Ok day two of ‘The Zoo’. I call it the zoo because once you
walk through those bars of death you are on your own with the animals, and I am
telling you, they are wild.
Today was fun, and productive, which is a big relief because
yesterday we were really unsure of how effective we were going to be.
I work with two amazing girls and we have decided that to be
effective we are going to need to take a class together instead of separately.
So we made plan…
We stopped by the local supermarket, Big C and bought a
bunch of toys, balls, books, cars etc for the kids. We are looking for items
that will be stimulating and teach the kids some motor skills, which have been
completely neglected.
We enter the zoo with the balls I the morning and they are
an instant hit. Let me just re-iterate how tiny the room is; we have four
adults, as Keegan, this big American dude came with us, about 15 kids and four
soccer balls… You may now refer to me as Stacey, the mayhem maker. I took it as
a personal challenge to see who could tire whom out first.
I am pretty sure I won. J
There was this one particular boy who is very timid, and
wasn’t getting all that involved. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) catch the ball when
thrown to him. So, I would take the ball
and pass it to him, he would throw it in the opposite direction to me, I would
take the ball and we would repeat this process, until finally, he worked out
how to catch the ball. He would continue to throw it away from me, which is all
part of the challenge I guess. The cool thing was, in one hour this boy went
from timid, barely making eye contact, to smiling, laughing, throwing and
catching the boy. We had a win.
We may not be able to change the way the teachers handle the
children or how uninvolved they are, but we can impact positively on these
beautiful children and this makes my heart smile.
Love, the happy wonderer xx
