OceanStars :: Tuesday 28th October 2025 :: Latest Blog Posts
Really great school - Pattipalai preschool.
I was greeted with 11 garlands - almost one per child (14 children in all). I looked like a cupcake In the photos.
The children were hungry so they ate before we came. Whether this was the reason or not, I noticed their ability to recall and repeat English words and numbers was good - they also seemed alert and ready to learn and very amenable to every activity.
They are in the government nutrition programme which is limited to the very very lowest budget areas of which this is one. The food they got wasn't as plentiful and varied as OS preschool lunches but I did wonder if the government practice if feeding the children early is something to consider. Hard to judge from only two schools though, and while we could split up the rest of the morning with further food intake of Milo and lollipops, on normal days, no breaks from 930 to 1130 is a long stretch.
They had one smallish room with no chairs or tables for kids but we all worked well on the floor and there was a lovely reading corner and it was nice to see them relax in my presence - one called me grandma!
Although it was such a poor school, I felt bowled over by their generosity. The children had milo but we had King coconut and vanilla milk in the break - my first time for both and then the were the garlands... the parents picking the flowers to make all those garlands and plucking the king coconuts from the tree.
We did all the usual activities, enhanced by a simple game Helen suggested to me yesterday - which we turned into a kind of simplified version of pass the parcel/caterpillar. It was really simple but they liked it a lot. They also enjoyed some impromptu caterpillar ventriloquism which was fun too.
