SOS Village Service Group

This is my fifth year with the service group SOS Village. Our service works with an orphanage called SOS Village to help teach children English, though it’s quite different from regular orphanages. SOS Village has multiple houses in their organization with a motherly figure taking care of a small group of children, like a family. Our OSC group tries to support them by helping to teach the children English. We do this in many ways such as reading together, playing English games and field games as well as swimming in the pool.

This year we have done a lot of reflecting on previous years and are approaching this year a little differently. In the past the kids have always been very excited in the pool and are all over the place which makes us have to go back and speak Sinhala to them for them to understand the rules which is not doing anything for their English. This year we want to do activities that we can translate into the pool so they are able to follow certain call outs like; go to the corner, do not jump and more.  Our first session was very good, our English lesson was very positive and worked well but once we got into the pool the kids were not listening to anything and were jumping and swimming freely. I completely get it since they are just excited to swim but we really were just trying to translate the English lesson into the pool. Our second session the same happened and we were unable to get the kids to understand what we were saying to continue the English lesson. For our upcoming session we are going to solely focus on our English session. We will most likely go to the playground and match up with our buddies and play some games so they are familiar with the vocabulary we will use in the pool. I’m hopeful that this plan will work out and I’m excited to see the SOS Village Kids improvement and overall enjoyment for our fun sessions.