Holly's Thailand Adventure : End of week 2

This has been a crazy great week. It started off on the bank holiday Monday when I was asked to attend the towns parade, where each school has a float. By attend, they meant that I would dress up as a queen, ride around on a float in a parade procession and be entered into a 'Miss Candle' beauty pageant (there is a lot of miscommunication) ...casual Monday. Despite the 40c heat in 4 layers of material, it was a fun day. It actually realised that I had won 'Miss Candle' when my director was shouting "number one! number one!" at me and the school were very pleased! Not sure how I'm going to get that trophy home though...

Teaching wise, this week has been a huge improvement. I think that the children are starting to see my as a teacher figure rather than an exciting 'farang' visitor to their school! This week I have taught the weather. I have started introducing games into the lessons, playing them at the end to reinforce the vocabulary that I have taught, and it seems as if they really help with the spelling/speaking aspect of their English learning. Hangman seems to be the winner here. I've had classes of 40 children racing up to the board to fill in the missing letters and it is so satisfying to watch, knowing that you have educated them on something new and that they remember it (most importantly!) Stickers seem to be a great motivation to get them enthusiastic about games.

I spent the weekend in Khon Kaen with a couple of other ETA's which was great, mostly because we got to escape the ghost town of Na Kae for a couple of days. The bus ride was a bit of a mare; we were told it would be around 2 hours but it ended up taking 5 hours in total - classic laid back Thai attitude with no sense of time keeping whatsoever! The bus ride was spent fantasising about English food so naturally the first stop when we got to the city was at a McDonalds! (By the time I got to school on Monday morning - our McDonald's trip was the talk of the school). We spent Saturday evening at Ton Tann Night Market which was the cleanest, most pretty night market I'd ever been to. There was live music and a lot of Chang...