Wednesday and Friday: at the Babies Home

Each Wednesday and Friday I am located at the CCD day care centre located at Fueng Fah, the government orphanage intended for children aged 0-7. Each day here is pretty much the same, in the morning the children are collected from the wards and taken to the centre. Most of the time we then suffer through a period of 'music' time, which is usually beautiful cacophony of various percussion instruments possibly played to the beat of the song that the Thai staff are singing.

In the morning there is occasionally a planned activity that is either planned by us as volunteers or the Thai staff. Some of the activities that we have done include: facepainting, normal painting, colouring, an obstacle course and lots of playing with toys. If there isn't an activity planned I do try and take some of the kids to do some one on one therapy. Usually I just focus on getting them to play with different toys and perhaps use some pretend play skills as these skills are such and important scaffold to build on for further language and communication skills. With some of the other kids I have also just focussed on getting them to interact and make sounds. It is really great that I have been able to see some progress and that they are making more sounds and just seem happier over all.

The afternoons usually involve a nap after lunch (while we as volunteers go get lunch ourselves) and then outside play on the toys. This is not very structured but there are plans to maybe do some messy/sand play or some water play which should be lots of fun for both the children and the volunteers.

Unfortunatley I don't have many photos on my camera (as a big SLR one is large and clunky and sometimes difficult to just slip out) I have to get some off the others who seem to have their cameras on them more often. So stay tuned for more pics.

xxx