Its been a great couple of days at school, with the kids behaviour having settled well and the whole experience becoming more fun for both them and us.

Doing my best to find the best angle to get the basics engrained, I have recently taken a whole load more photos of items around the school itself, figuring that the everyday things are the best new words to teach early on.

And after going through them all yesterday in the standard, ‘what is this?’ form, today was game playing day to see how much had stuck.

Laying the pictures out on the ground and splitting the class into 2 groups, I called out an item, e.g ‘swing’, and one child from each group had to go find the right photo. Its a great game, that gets a little heated at times as the kids are very competitive, and i believe a great aid to learning.

Judging by the number of clues I had give with nearly every item, not an awful lot had stuck from the day before. So each time they got the right photo we held it up and everyone had to repeat, ..”this is a……..”. Very noisey, very boisterous and lots of fun.

After school Boon and I went into Chiang Mai for our second session at the gym, stopping on the way for high energy ‘Kow Soi’.

Having suffered remarkably little stiffness after the last session I was keen to keep up the momentum of this fitness drive.

Starting with 20 minutes on the treadmill I then worked my round the machines, concentrating more on the stomach this time, but also working on chest and shoulders.

In all we did about an hour and 5 minutes this time, and I made sure I finished with 5 minutes slow pace on the treadmill to allow my heartrate to settle down slowly. That certainly seemed to make the difference, as I felt alot less wobbly when I came out than last time, even after having a fair bit more.

The ride home became a battle with nature as the winds rose and we did our best to avoid a very visible rainstorm ahead of us. At one point we hit the edge of the storm and did a hasty U turn, outrunning the storm for a while and staying dry. But as we rejoined highway 11 it was obvious that the way ahead was being hit by a heavy deluge and that it was heading our way. So we took shelter for a while and escaped the worst of it.

Once the wind dropped and the rainfall got significantly lighter, we donned our rain coats and carried on home.

for more photos from today visit our photobucket album here.