Week schedule. (temporary)

What am I doing here?

The mornings are free, because the children are in school. Maybe later this time will be spent to prepare activities.

On tuesday and thursday I have 2 hours of greek lesson. (It's going very well)

As a volunteer I eat with the children, lunch at 13:30 and dinner at 19:30. So at 13:30 the working day starts...

After lunch the children have to make their homework, this is a difficult activity for me to help with, becaus I cannot understand what the actual asseignment is. Maths on the other hand, I can help but the explaining -again- can be difficult.

It is also quite difficult to motivate them, a lot of them really hate homework and complain a lot about the amount they have to write. Once I tried making it a competition and they seemed to like it.

At 16:00, time for a snack and around this time there are a lot of fixed activities. For example: music, theater, gymnastics, breakdance... (and a cleaning competition in the bedrooms).

For now I'm participating more in the fixed activities than making other activities. There are some problems with the main organisation of activities, classes... so untill then it is not so easy to implement new activities, I'll have to be patient for a while and the programme will eventually include other activities, made by the EVS -volunteers.

Other occupations: The library, a.k.a. 'book chaos'. The library inside the institution would be an excellent place for activities to take place. But until now it doesn't look very attractive. The walls have some old paintings or framed puzzles, and the books: 1 a lot of the books aren't very child -proof (for example a book about heroïne with a lot of pictures about how to do it and the consequenses). Okay children should be informed but we're not trying to traumatise them.
Also a lot of ancient encyclopedia. Second the books are thrown in the cupboards, there is absolutely no system of categorisation.

So we are trying to get rid of the old books and the books that are not on child level and make some theme divisions like: story's, fairy tales, animals, technologie, picturebooks and so on.
We'll make some decorations with the children for the walls, so the place looks more attractive for them. Also rearrange the cupboards and we're using for example only the shelves on the height of the children.

Saturday we'll go with some older boys to a breakdance battle outside the institution and next week I'll be participating in the 'On-arrival'-training in a 5 star hotel =). I will be meeting lots of EVS -volunteers then. I'm looking forward to that...