Chae, hails from Australia and on break from her University studies and was very keen to gain valuable experience, teaching English at a rural Thai School.

She is very enthusiastic and with her friendly, fun and dramatic methods of teaching, is already very popular with all the students.

Starting of doing 2 hours teaching Monday to Friday, Chae has now decided to commit more time and usually does 3- 4hours now.

In her first week it turned out that Mae Salaab School would be closed for 3 days, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

This was good luck for Pasak School in Banthi, Lamphun as she is now doing the 3 days there.

Next week she will resume teaching at Mae Salaab for approximately 1 month.
She has also expressed an interest in helping out with the Thai Schools English website and we hope to find time for some basic training on how to input lessons which she would then be able to do, even when she goes back home.
We hope she is just the first of many teachers that we can place in many nearby schools, all desperate for help with their English learning programs.
If you are interested in becoming a volunteer teacher here in Chiang Mai please contact us to discuss the options we can offer.

It was great to see the Pasak children again, this is where I taught for nearly the full year last year. I am happy to have been able to facilitate Chaes 3 day teaching visit and hope that we can soon place a longer term volunteer here to.

Our little river in Mae Salab is now a raging torrent and the waters at Huay Tung Tao have risen much since last week.
With the rain comes increasing levels of mosquitos so daily spraying with deterrent is a high priority.

Spending much time in doors has brought more art work to our walls, which is always nice.

In order to try and combat the numbers of mosquitos we have been doing our best to control the fast growing garden vegetation and this weekend all the older children took turns with the strimmer.

They all did a great job and this will be a regular task whenever we have a dry period and some spare time.

Sundays trip to Huay Tung Tao was fun as usual, though cut short by more rain.

Tai was missing as he spent the day at school attending a Energy Conservation Seminar.

On the way to Huay Tung Tao we stopped off at two new locations for our collection boxes, Photobug in Chang Puek Rd and El Diablos Burreto restaurant in Moon Maung Rd. Full details will soon appear in our “Where To Go and Fing..” Directory which I hope to make live by the end of the week.

Luckily the rain held off on Tuesday morning enabling me to go for my 3rd teaching session at Huay Sai School. We spent the lesson showing the children how to use the Thai Schools English website and its Moodle section.

Today I  visited, and shall do every Tuesday, Huay Sai School to assist with teaching English conversation to Mattayom 1.

When that is finished I will then be working on building up the courses and lessons available to users of the thaischoolsenglish website, for the rest of the day.

I also hope to find time to visit and encourage more local schools to join our program.

Todays lesson was centred on basic introduction.

Although the children were a little nervous at first we soon broke through that and I was impressed with the students efforts.

For more photos please visit our photobucket album here.

If you are interested in the school website, please go here.

Having been very busy ensuring registration for the Foundation I had been unable to give the thaischoolsenglish project any time over recent months. Now as I consolidate my daily routine I hope to resume my assistance with this worthwhile project.

In return Khruu Khem has agreed to be a regular visitor to the home, by way of offering some independant monitoring of our work.

She will come to visit the Childrens Home and be able to speak freely with the children on all aspects of their life here at Stratton House.

Childrens Day is an annual event in Thailand, held on the second weekend in January, where a lot of effort is put into making a special day for all children.

Personally I prefer it to Xmas as there is no religious pretence, just blatant spoiling of the children for a day.

Indeed many children get more than one day as the schools often hold their own ‘Childrens Day’ on the Friday, as they did at Pasak School, where I teach.

It was not an easy decision as to where to take the children from Stratton House on Childrens Day; so many events, large and small, to choose from.

In the end we elected to follow advice given by a local friend and take them to Airforce 41 Base, close to Chiang Mai Airport, where, we were told , there would be several aircraft on display and lots of interesting stuff going on.

Hindsight is a pretty useless thing as, but in hindsight it was not such a good descision for us.

It certainly was a big affair with thousands of local families attending. Our problem was the numbers and lay-out. From the car parking area there was quite along route to walk to get to where all the aircraft and activities were.

This route was lined with hundreds of stalls selling all manner of clothes, toys, nic-nacs, food, etc; so many distractions for the kids within a narrow walkway packed with hundreds of people.

Within 10 minutes we had lost the two older boys. Although confident that they could look after themselves we still needed to locate them incase an emergency caused us to need to leave. Everyone had been issued with a card with phone number to ring if our group got seperated.

Leaving the other children at The Bouncy Castle with Wasana, our house Mum, myself and Boon went on a search. Nearly 2 hours later after much searching and numerous tannoy calls we bumped into the 2 boys on the way back to the car, blissfully unaware of the stress they had caused.

Lucky it was Childrens Day and they got away with  stern instruction not to wander off again. In view of the crowds and difficulty in keeping the group together we then left Airforce 41 and drove into Chiang Mai to Kad Suan Kaow Shopping Mall where there was a special Childrens Day playground set up in the centre ‘garden’.

After lunch in the Food Court in the lower level of the Mall we took the Children to the fun and games in the central garden area.

The two older boys were given the job of acting as extra eyes to keep an eye out for the younger ones as they joined the fun.

Being a much more contained area the crowds were not such a problem and the kids had a great afternoon.

It was late afternoon , early evening when they got their special Childrens Day surprise, made possible by the generous efforts of the Faa Gamma fundraising team in Australia.

The team kindly held a special Xmas appeal to raise money to purchase bicycles for the children to use and enjoy.

We were able to buy four bicycles for the children to share and these were presented to the children on their return to Stratton House.

Apologies for the poor photo quality.

Many thanks to our good friend Heather and all her team; the kids love the bikes and use them everyday as soon as they return from school.

For more photos from Childrens Day please visit our photobucket album here.