The completion of a school term is celebrated with a party at Yaowawit. The event marks not only the closing of a term but also the beginning of a school break, when most of the students go to stay with their guardians, who mostly live far from Yaowawit. To make the party special, Yaowawit this time included an intercultural learning day with a theme of wonderland and fairy tales into the party.

Thus, the students and teachers each dressed in various fairytale characters from Snow White to the Weaving Maiden from the Chinese folklore. In addition, some children also dressed as castle walls and trees. The culture-learning part of the event was that the students who did not know the fairytale characters that they were dressing up as were helped with the stories along with finding out the regions where the stories originated.

The creative and educational part of the event was in the shows. The students had to act, speak, and dance the way their characters do as much as they could. With confidence, they performed the shows group after group. Maleficent, K-Pop, and Snow White groups got the most applause. However, all other groups were equally talented as they managed to improvise their shows during the rehearsals.

In the audience were Yaowawit’s founder Khun Philipp and guests from Thanyapura. This event is one of various school events that Yaowawit’s students perform on certain occasions over the coming months. If you want to join our next events, email us at info@yaowawit.org.

Students need to learn about the natural world as early as possible because its future existence will depend on how much they are willing to engage in understanding and preserving it. That motivation led Yaowawit to set up a nature camp in which participants, called as campers, would be outdoors and engaged in fun and interactive lessons about a forest ecosystem. The primary activities were designed to be different from any of those offered in regular schools.

Those activities took place in the farm and in the valleys around the school where the campers in different groups could explore, identify, or study parts of an intertwined ecosystem of a rainforest. Being there, they could smell the trees, see various kinds of bugs, and hear the sounds of birds or insects they had likely never seen before. Not only that, they dug the forest floor at different places to collect dead leaves, decayed buds, or fallen fruits that had become the layers of the forest. Moreover, they also drew and described the things they saw so that the experiences were shared with their other fellows among the groups.

Being in the rain and walking in the mud was also part of the experience. During the soil identification activity, the campers collected mud along a certain depth in the ground at different places. Those lumps of mud were then placed in jars of water. Then the jars were shaken, and after a while, the mud showed different colors. When the mud settled, it formed layers. The colors and layers were different from jar to jar. Through their drawings, the campers learned and explained the soil differences at different places in the forest.

Besides such involved activities in nature, the campers also played sports and games, sang songs, did meditations, and took several tours outside Yaowawit including a visit to a local market and a trip to Khao Sok National Park.

Our programme to introduce these young students to the natural world they should know about has got a positive feedback not only from them but also from their parents. Therefore, we are going to add more forest exploration activities in our next nature camp in the next school break, which will be in April 2020. So, stay in touch and if you want to sign up your children, contact us again by then at info@yaowawit.org.

Student groups from UWC Thailand (located in Phuket) have been Yaowawit’s frequent student visitors during a school holiday. This time a group of four new students from UWC Thailand also visited Yaowawit to do a social work.

The group carried out most of the activities in the farm. Helped by Yaowawit’s students who remained at the school during this school holiday, the group cleaned up the newly open patches of land for another school garden. There they also watered and ploughed the soil with hand shovels along the patches on which new crops could then be planted. Bamboos were cut and set into frames around the areas of the patches to keep the soil free from intruding weeds. In the greenhouse, the group focused on caring young crops that needed regular watering. At some patches, they covered the areas with plastic covers so that the soil and the crops under the covers could conserve water and thus remain sufficiently moistened. The group’s other activities in the farm included collecting chicken egg and goat milk.

Outside the farm, the group also did fun activities with Yaowawit’s children mostly in the afternoons. They played games and sports together and went for a picnic at a hot spring and a waterfall.

Such activities can be an enriching experience for anyone new to Yaowawit. If your group also wants to do a social work here, contact us at info@yaowawit.org.