The Science Team

So whilst Jack, Angus and Evelyn have been jetting around the country, Alison and I have been here in Poipet working on the other side of the project.

Our first aim on the education side, was to create a lesson plan to assist the "School on a mat" teachers to teach about clean water and hygiene. We put together a lesson plan using lots of resources we brought with us and experiments created for DIEM last year, and presented it to the teachers. It took a while, we learnt quickly that things aren´t fast in this country, but after a couple of weeks we got all the teachers giving it a go and had a lot of positive feedback. We seemed to be introducing a few new teaching styles but once they got the idea, the teachers seemed to love it. Below is some of the kids doing a roll play from our lesson, the squatting boy is supposed to be going to the loo, something the kids found pretty funny.

We did manage to get in a trip to Siem Reap for Jack´s birthday and saw a temple, but instead of showing you another photo of a big temple, here´s a grumpy snake.

But for most of the time we were in Poipet and the general conclusion is...there´s not much to do here. Although one highlight is watching the traffic down the main road, sometimes which looks as though it´s a tad overloaded,

After the School on the mat success we had to move on to preparing for “Science week”, a series of afternoon science classes. We focussed on the topic of Energy, making a load of fun stuff from water wheels to balloon cars. It all went really well, now we just need to try and get the teachers to see the benefit of using these fun experiments as a teaching method.

After class we spent the time waiting for bus, picking the “macon” berries which the kids couldn´t reach. The berries are very sweet and taste strangely like honeycomb.

This weekend the others returned, it was great to see them again but now there´s much more competition for my hammock.

Chris