People are great!

Help from all-over

At our Singapore office, a plain brown box appeared. The invoice was strange, marked down to nearly zero. Puzzled, I checked my email.

I had enquired with a sanitation supplier in Malaysia, Steriline, about ordering Glo-Germ for handwashing lessons. And they replied to say that after checking our website to donate all the supplies we would need for hundreds of kids! Glo-germ gel, powder and the handheld UV light.

It's not just the money we've saved from not having to buy the supplies, but the unasked kindness. I only knew about Glo-Germ because of a safety-engineer who took the time to educate me about community-scale hygiene across cultures and languages with very practical tips.

A visitor next month is bringing masses of prenatal vitamins for us, another NGO offering to pitch in on the translation costs for some of our materials, a retired teacher gathering up all her classroom posters for us....

These people did the most helpful thing possible - they told us what they could do or give best and asked us what we needed from that.

Thank you, Steriline! Now I need to scrub my hands a third time to get the glo-germ gel properly washed off *g*



Sandpit

We had to fix the drains around one of the buildings, and after everything was fixed, the builder had a bunch of sand left over which was set up as a sandpit for the kindergarteners!

We're getting a transparent vinyl cover for night, and setting up a raking and cleaning schedule. This'll probably be the cleanest patch of dirt in the entire slum!

Blog posts

I just wanted to clarify that our blogs are written by several different people. There's me, Dale Edmonds, in Singapore, and in a way, Elaine Meyers who edits many of our reports for us. Then our Cambodia staff write blog entries, and occasionally a foreign volunteer in Phnom Penh will help write and edit the blog posts.

I love having multiple voices on this blog. For some of us, English is a third-language, so do ask if anything isn't clear!

Kindergarten Cupboards!

Heli our kindergarten coordinator has been requesting for hardy cupbpards for the kindergarten for the longest time! The cupboards had to be low enough such that the kindergarteners can see over the top of the cupboards - these areas will be little display areas for the kids' works - their little 15 minutes of fame! And the cupboards had to be 'lockable' so that teachers can keep kindergarten resources and toys without worrying about things going missing since another family stays in the kindergarten at night.

Pre-cupboards days saw toys and resources being kept in huge opaque plastic buckets with lids. Those are bulky, hard to retrieve things out of and bigger than most of the kindergarteners. We tried getting a cupboard earlier but quality was a big problem with unlockable locks and rough surfaces. These new cupboards though, are a vast improvement from the old cupboards we had. And they come in a cheery green!

Four cupboards on the wall.

Happy kids, happy teachers, green cupboards.

Games and toys neatly sorted.

Kindergarten co-ordinator, Heli Kytola

Heli is a teacher with many years of experience with children with special needs and has often had to adjust her teaching methods to suit the students’ needs. Through Riverkids she is now doing training with the teachers on how to approach their students and to work for a better learning environment.

I started working here in Phnom Penh in the beginning of October and four exiting weeks have already passed. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly so it is easy to like it here.

I have been monitoring the Kindergarten classes and I having some work shops with the teachers. We have been discussing some general ideas about early childhood learning, different developmental stages and ages and how to observe the children in the classroom. We have refurnished the classroom and made an inventory list of the material that should be available for us as well as the children in the classroom at all times. We have also tried to figure out how to get the parents more involved in their children’s schooling.

We have a book about different developmental stages in English which seems fairly easy to read as well as some web pages but we need to get the pages translated before we can start studying properly. I don't have many books here so I need to research the Internet or put together a list of books that are the “musts” for me to buy.

If you have any recommendations for further reading, please forward it to me. I would love to find some informative and “easy” to read books or web pages about recent research on children’s play and the importance of playing so if you know where to find them please let me know, I would appreciate that a lot.

Our children in the Kindergarten are from 4 to 7 years of age. They are really lovely young people. The age mix and shortage of staff makes the lessons quite challenging to plan. The teachers are responsible for 15-20 students each as it is now.

Most of our children just love the Kindergarten. There are more toys to play with in the Kindergarten now than before since we got some Lego donated. Lego is really great and the kids love to build things with them but they do love the jigsaw puzzles and the Khmer alphabet puzzles as well. They do some counting and writing of letters in Khmer every day and they have some time in the morning to learn the weekdays and the date of the day etc. We need to buy or make numbers and number cards in Khmer since the numbers are completely different from Arabic numerals.

It also would be great to have some very simple wooden building bricks (Kapla) in the classroom. You know the ones children use when they build houses, stables and garages or just want to keep some toys separate by building fences between them.

Unfortunately we can’t have any regular outdoor activities because there is no playground and no space for football or any other sports activities near the Kindergarten so the teachers sing activity songs and rhymes in the classroom for the children to do some exercise. If we wanted to have a sports activity day one day we would probably need to take a minivan to the Olympic Stadium to do so. That we haven’t done yet with the small children, but who knows, maybe one day…

Heli Kytola

Kindergarten and Playcentre

I'm in New Zealand for a bit with family, so I got to visit a playcentre, which is the main kindergarten model that we're following. It's funny - the two most popular 'alternative' learning styles, Reggio and Montessori both started in slums too. Playcentre is still pretty working class as well.

Two parents working in the East Wanganui Playcentre answered lots of questions patiently and showed me around and passed me some of their teaching materials. Jolene's going to be really pleased - so nice to have a proven worked-out curriculum that we can adapt rather than invent from scratch. It's got a lot of Maori cultural stuff which means we can replace that with Khmer cultural stuff and maybe even some Vietnamese, localising it.

Playcentre is child-led learning - basically, it's loosely structured kindy for kids from 0-6 by having lots of parent volunteers, parent training and quite laid-back. One of my sister's put her kids through playcentre which is how I know about it, and the best thing for us is the strong emphasis on parent involvement.

So far, what we've noticed is that the kids in Grade School are struggling with fine motor control - they're amazing little gymnasts, great balance and so on, but they struggle with pencils and scissors. Plus pretty limited literacy exposure.

Playcentre in NZ has to worry about different things - food hygiene for them is more about healthy snacks and disposable gloves, they're big on outdoor play and their parents want to be there, plus a huge amount of community and government support.

But the same kind of toys - puppets, basic metric blocks, playdough and fingerpainting. The same getting parents to work together, and also thanfully, the same 'how do we get untrained people to being really great child-centered teachers' problem, and lots of really good ideas.

They do this neat thing with folders, the kind where you can slip pages into the plastic leaves? Each child gets a 'public' folder, for their artwork, special events reports (field trips with photos!) and a week's worth of daily write-ups on one page. This is all positive stuff. Anything negative goes into the private folder. So the child has this lovely happy document, a growing scrapbook of them and their progress.

I've promised to email them some photos of our kindergartners when I next see them. Wish I'd taken some of the playcenter so our teachers could see their place!

Some photos of Kindergarten at Churten House

The littlies all around the big low table that's our main piece of furniture at the new Kindergarten. Classes are split into two sessions, morning and afternoon, of about four hours length. The first batch get breakfast and the second batch get lunch, plus snacks.

Riverkids was given quite a lot of children's toys, and we've been holding back the toys for the little kids for a while, so it's lovely to see them finally hard at 'work' with all the little children.

There are 20 children between 3 to 6 years old in each classroom. Originally we planned on 12 to 15, but demand as usual outstripped our supply, so we came up with a happy solution of hiring two young teenage girls ,who weren't allowed to join the Get Ready course, as kindergarten helpers. They help for one session and then go to the Grade School for at least some basic literacy and a chance at catching up for the other half of the day.

We don't have much happening just yet beyond showers, breakfast, lots of play with toys and a simple structured curriculum. Jolene has put together two months curriculum based on themes, and she's working with the teachers to get a much more play and child centered style of teaching instead of the usual drills and repetition that the teachers are used to.

Photos of Kindercare at Steven House

On 02 May,2007 Steven House started kindergarten.

At the first time, we only enrolled 15 kids with ages around 5-6. Most of the kids are from the slum near Steven House.

The Kindergarten lessons are conducted by an experienced kindergarten teacher, Sour Sokunthea. She is happy with the kids, although it is really a hard job.



In the first stage, we only provide some simple stationery like the students' board, chalk, notebook, pencil.

We also provide breakfast and snacks for the kids.

Recently we received some second clothes, which donated by Singaporean families which Dale brought up for Riverkids. We provided each set of clothes to each kids. They were very happy when they got their new clothes.

The next step when the kindergarten class is quite stable, is that we will provide each child with a school bag and uniform and they can get immunization and better healthcare.