By Gemma Luxton – 4 weeks intern

I came to KSES for the elephants. For my own experience. To build my knowledge around collecting data and hoping to gain a useful entry on my CV. What I didn’t expect was to bring my love of teaching with me and actually be able to use it.

In the UK I work as a 1-1 support for children with additional learning needs. It is something I am very passionate about. So, I was excited to hear of the opportunity to teach some lessons in the village nursery. The challenge was new for me, teaching children with minimal spoken English. Luckily, I had our guide, Gae, to help explain to the children my intentions for different activities.

The children themselves were excited, engaged and cheeky. They enjoyed songs that I knew, like “Wheels on the Bus”, “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes” and, of course, “Baby Shark”! My favourite thing about my job in the UK was being creative with my lesson plans, and I like to think I brought a little bit of that with me here. I really enjoyed coming up with fun, yet simple, games that would make the children’s learning fun. I enjoyed watching their faces as they tried to remember the things we had learned the week before.

Lastly, I wanted to make a lasting impression on not only the children, but the village community. Our weekly village litter picks inspired me for one final lesson. I wanted to instil the idea of keeping their community, and nature, as clean as they could. Something they could easily make an impact on was cleaning up the litter in their village and keeping it clean by not littering themselves. An idea was born by one of the children using their hands as binoculars. We collected toilet roll tubes and created “litter-hunting binoculars”. On the way home from our last lesson together, the children used their new binoculars to hunt down any litter they could find. They were amazing! It is my hope that this will last with them.