Last week was a challenge. Week three of anything new is always hard for me, and I had some health problems to deal with too, so it didn't help that one of the kids (don't know his name, but let's call him Damian for now) was being a monster child.

Monday, he stole my scissors and cut the ends off every skein of embroidery silk, leaving me with 8 inch lengths of uselessness. Tuesday, when I ran out of colouring sheets, he started spitting. At me! Wednesday, I ran out of patience and marched him off to teacher. My strategy this week is to give him something to do early on, in the hope of distracting him from any plans for sabotage.

I've grown very fond of some of the kids. Two of the older ones, Anuba-Yen and Susan (bottom picture), love learning to sew. See-Kutin (wearing a blue wool moustache) is a cheeky monkey but good fun. And Febin loves to draw. He's pictured with one of a series of pictures he's done of me; on this one I've actually got hair, so that's good.

The session yesterday was great. I worked with a small group and we made a caterpillar. We drew around different sized metal tumblers to make circles, cut them out and decorated them with crayon, then stuck them on to a piece of pink card to make a wiggley caterpillar. The Malayalam word for caterpillar sounds something like 'puru', but is completely unpronounceable. I tried my best, but must have got it hopelessly wrong, as there was a lot of giggling and Keralan head waggling going on.

Anyway, the finished caterpillar picture was great. One of the boys cut out flower shapes and I made some leaves. We stuck some shiny stars in the sky (and on the ends of the 'puru's' antennae, and some small fluffy yellow balls for its eyes. Lovely!