Good week and a great weekend

A great weekend started with a good week. This past week a fellow volunteer, Katherine, and I worked with a few of the teachers children on their English skills. We met with them for three morning seasons of three hours to read stories, play games, sing a few songs, and learn from one another. I had a great time with my class of six and their enthusiasm for playing hangman and 20 questions was uplifting. As time goes on, I'm learning more and more what and how things are taught in the school systems here. My impression so far is: there are similarities in what they are learning to the states but big differences in how and when things are taught. I will blog about this latter once I observe a little more. So, for these few days I tried to make the learning process into a game and a more hands on approach! We spent time each day reading a story, discussing the story, and then creating the characters out of play-dough and acting it out. The play-dough is something they loved to do and we could have spent all our time together just creating things out of it. My six students were a quiet energy group until they had the opportunity to 'be the teacher' and each one was put in charge of the different games played!

Other highlights of the week:

Watching the crabs at the beach! They have their own little world that is hypnotizing to watch as they dig out and defend their holes.

Exploring downtown: Ellen, another volunteer, and I went downtown Kota Kinabalu (KK) and found some local markets of food and souvenirs. Then we thought we would try a Malaysia past time event and go to the mall. We spent time at one of the 9? 10? malls that they have and enjoyed walking around and seeing all the Christmas decorations.

This picture show four of the levels in Center Point Mall. Each mall has a unique layout and to me it seems like they built the main building then decided to just add on here and there around the outside. It is very easy to get lost a little inside this mall.

Then to top of the week Ellen and I baked some Christmas sugar cookies, homemade bread, and even experiment to make homemade pizza. It was great fun and the food actually turned out great! Hopefully, we will be able to learn some traditional Malay food before returning.