Sinhalese New Year Celebration at the PCHC.

Today we held a little Festival at the centre, for the Preschool kids and their parents. A pot of milk was set up over a small fire, and when the milk boils and spils over the edges the celebration has officially started. After that, a few woman sat around a drum and made some music, but the kids usually interrupted as everyone wanted to have a go at the large drum. The parents have each brought a type of traditional New Years food and everyone sits and eats for a while. Then the kids received presents from Ms. Heidi a celebration mask and 10 rupees (this is tradition). After that, lots of games are played, like races (to get flags), balancing round objects on spoons, tug-of-war, putting lotus flowers on thin sticks, etc. At the end of all the games Ms. Ashoka had the preschool kids walk around a tree in the centre garden and picked the "Little Waves Prince and Princess" (one girl and one boy is chosen for each 1st place, 2nd place and 3rd place). Right at the end before everyone went home, Ipinis father handed out gifts to each of the preschool students, and then everyone said bye and went home happily.

Hi Shari,

just wanted to say that i think this is a really nice blog and that the pictures are amazing! really nice :)

enjoy!

xx lisa

your tumblr and the work that you're doing is SO, so beautiful. i'm so glad i found it!

thank you so much!

thursday preschool.

Wethmi and her new umbrella.

thursday preschool.

thursday preschool.

Ipini, Rashmi and Kalpani.

thursday preschool.

Chamika

thursday preschool.

Sahan climbing, again.

thursday preschool.

Sahan climbing trees.

thursday preschool.

The kids and Ms. Ashoka making flags for tomorrows games at the centre's Sinhalese New Year Festival.

wednesday art class.

Today was my last art class, so I just asked the kids to draw whatever they felt like. A few of them finished their paintings of Lord Buddha, and others drew a temple surrounded by trees and water. All in all it was a very enjoyable last lesson, and I will miss doing art with these kids a lot. I hope I'll get a chance to come back soon.

I printed out some of the photos I took of the preschool children over the last few weeks and pasted them on a large poster to hang up inside or outside the classroom. I came up with this idea when I saw how much the kids enjoyed looking at pictures of the past preschool class and their own Christmas festival last year. They seemed to like these photos as well, which made me quite happy.

tuesday art class.

This is Tharusha and her older sister. She often comes to the centre to pick up Tharusha from English/art class and I asked her to join us. She also agreed to join us for wednesday's art class because she actually really enjoys painting. Its a shame she didn't come before, she would have been able to paint quite a lot.

tuesday art class.

This is Imasha and her mother painting. I asked her to join us when I saw that she had already arrived and was waiting for her daughter.

tuesday art class

Today we painted Lord Buddha, meditating under a tree. I saw a postcard like this in the kid's English Classroom and Nirosha had asked if we could paint something like it. So the kids, very enthusiastically, did their interpretation of this image and it turned out quite well.