OceanStars :: Saturday 25th October 2025 :: Latest Blog Posts
Batticaloa and some very good news
The training session was a great chance for the preschool teachers to meet each other - about 36 of them, get new ideas for teaching and teaching methods, share their practice and give very valuable feedback to Ocean Stars. The atmosphere was full of encouragement and warmth on both sides - from the trainers and the trainees. The preschool teachers were so attentive and keen to learn - one of them had a 3 hour journey to get here for this half-day training, but it didn't put her off.
The day was really integrated with our upcoming visits to schools as the theme was of course, the very hungry caterpillar and I loved the fact that the teachers had already prepared their own cut-out very hungry caterpillars and beautiful butterflies of varying shapes and sizes.
During the morning, they also prepared the 800 butterfly hats that the children are going to colour in and put on to dance butterfly dances. Many of the teachers cited their favourite aspect of the book as being the way it introduced the life cycle of the butterfly. There were some great ideas about how to integrate what was learnt with the natural environment outside, where caterpillars may be crawling and also to make it even more Sri Lankan by talking about mangos as well as apples etc. I was also impressed by one group's plan to dramatise the book, with each child acting out an element in the book.
Recently, the government has announced that preschools are going to be closed next month because of A levels. Rather than leave the children with no input for a month, the teachers agreed to run an hour's holiday club every day so that the children's learning and progress can continue.
The day ended with the handing out of resources from the UK. A preschool in Fleet recently closed and they donated their many resources to Ocean Stars. One room in Ocean Stars office is now full of some of these resources. There is so much stuff that I wondered how the women were going to carry it back.
And while I was writing this blog in the office in walked a young man whose schooling Ocean Stars had sponsored. He had come with the news that he had been accepted into medical school in the south of Sri Lanka. Like in the UK, medical school is really hard to get into and, as he confirmed, the help from Ocean Stars definitely contributed to his success. What a great story!
I asked him for his message to anyone thinking of sponsoring a child's education and he said, 'if you plant a seed one day it will become a tree. You help others and the tree will help others.'
And to other sponsor children, he says,
'They are giving you hope, give back that hope to them' - what a poet!
