March 25, 2007
Greetings from Phi Phi!
Well, it's official- the school year has come to a close here at Baan Koh Phi Phi School. Last Friday was our final day of teaching and it was difficult to say goodbye to all of our students. Living and teaching on such a small island, we were able to get to know the children very well over the course of this year. Fortunately, since the community is so tiny on Phi Phi, we will certainly be running into them over and over again until we leave for good!
Over the last couple of months, we were able to participate in some exciting projects with Eagle Hill School, Redding Elementary School, and Old Greenwich School. The projects with Eagle Hill and Redding Elementary consisted of the students in Connecticut and here on Phi Phi exchanging pen pal letters. The students on both ends of the project were extremely excited to receive these international letters from each other. We felt that they were able to get a good sense of each other's culture through the information that was included. We have also begun work with Eagle Hill on a photo/art project. We took pictures of our Thai students and emailed them to the art teacher at Eagle Hill, who will have her classes use these pictures to create their own artwork.
Finally, we were very lucky to have Old Greenwich School feature our school as their community service project. They fundraised an unbelievable amount of school supplies and sports equipment for our students and shipped over large bins filled with them. The teachers and students here were absolutely thrilled to receive these treats.
They were certainly a welcome addition to our instructional materials in the classroom!
Needless to say, teaching here on Phi Phi has been an amazing and unforgettable experience. We will miss the island and all of the people whom be have met here along the way, but are excited to do a bit of traveling now that school is finished. Ultimately, we can't wait to come home and see all of you, without whom none of this would have been possible...
Thank you again for all of your support throughout this project!
Tracy and Stacy
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January 12, 2007
Hello Friends,
Happy New Year! We can hardly believe that it is already the middle of January. Time has been flying here on the island and everything continues to be an adventure, but is rewarding and successful.
As far academics, we have been concentrating on implementing the scope and sequence that we came up with with the English coordinator at the beginning of the term. Main focuses have been on basic conversation, foods, colors, calendar vocabulary, numbers, and letter-sound relationships. The kids have caught on well. We have incorporate as many hand-on activities and games into our instruction as possible, so that the kids can have fun as well as benefit from the instruction.
A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to go on a 2-day school trip to Krabi with a group of teachers and students. The purpose of the trip was for students who had scored high marks on recent standardized tests to compete in an academic competition with students from other schools across the district. Many of our students did very well and placed highly in various subject areas, including one of our 3rd graders, who placed second in the English section (yay!) while competing against children from 17 other schools! Very exciting for everyone...
Today was Children Appreciation Day in Thailand. This means that instead of classes the students and teachers spend the day playing games and eating ice cream and candy, which is always a treat for our students. The entire island was involved in the festivities donating various prizes, snacks, and school supplies. The local police came and spent the day making homemade popsicles for everyone. It was a nice chance to see the kids in a non-academic setting--kids just being kids.
The construction at the school is continuing at a snails pace. As promised the school yard has been reconstructed, however we received word the other day that the actually school building is no longer structurally sound and will be torn in the next few months. During the tsunami the foundation was hit hard and instead of fixing the infrastructure they only patched the damaged parts. The headmaster spend the last 12 days in Bangkok trying to secure funding for the building project as funding continues to be a struggle for the school
Thanks again for all your support and thoughts as we continue helping the children of Phi Phi Island. We hope you had a wonderful holiday season.
Tracy and Stacy
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November 6, 2006
Hello everyone, greetings from Phi Phi.
We wanted to fill you in on on the happenings from our last update. Things have been in a constant state of change. The school is still undergoing a massive rebuilding and construction project. Since moving into the school faculty housing about a month ago, this construction serves as our 6 AM wake up call every morning. Supposedly, the construction is to be completed by the end of the month, but we have some serious doubts as to the validity of that statement. If you think construction timelines fall behind in the States...visit Thailand. It has introduced us to a whole new level of patience...whether it's waiting for food at a restaurant, scheduled meetings to begin, or for the water to get turned on so that we can take our long awaited showers, we are constantly reminded that we are on "Thai Time" and might as well embrace it.
As for school, we just began our new term. Now we are primarily focusing on leading the teaching in grades 1-4 as opposed to playing a supporting role to the Thai teachers. We spent some time during the past month meeting with the Headmaster and English Coordinator assessing the goals and scope-and-sequence of the upcoming term. We helped to write a structured curriculum based off the poor books they were using. The school cannot afford new books for every student, so our efforts in modifying what they do have has proved to be very beneficial. We just began our second week of the term and things have started off on a positive note. The kids seems enthusiastic as ever and are responding well to our structured lessons. Future volunteers will also be able to add to and use these lessons to better benefit the students.
Currently the school is sponsoring the island's sports month. Since the moment it started we have enjoyed watching soccer (football, to rest of the world) with most of the Phi Phi community after school and into the evenings. It's been a great opportunity to meet our students' families. As we look around the concrete playing field (yes, they play soccer on asphalt) we constantly notice that we are the only western faces in the crowd. We've also had the opportunity to eat true traditional Thai food without western flair. They are in no way trying to cater to the tourist and we have found this to be some of the best food we've ever experienced. Sports month is an event that is looked forward to annually and we have enjoyed being a part of it. We learned today that before the tsunami there were 62 various teams competing in the sports tournaments. Now, there are 29 teams. Each year as the island continues to rebuild they hoping for more and more teams to participate.
Last night was another great cultural experience. Thai people celebrated their annual Loy Krathong festival. This festival takes place every year during the 11th month's full moon. The purpose of this festival is to release bad luck from the previous year. One does so by building a float out of banana trees and flowers and casting out into various bodies of water with burning incense and candles. People also drop in cut fingernails and hair for good health and money for financial stability in the upcoming year. When we learned of this festival we went to the Thai Market and bought the necessary supplies to make our own float. We released it into the ocean with the rest of the Phi Phi community. We'll let you know how our luck turns out....
As you can tell from this email, things are going great and we are really enjoying our time on the island. We know this could never have happened without all your support.
