Doing the fashion show with the girls proved to be a great way to establish a close connection with them. Throughout the rest of the week, they displayed confidence when it came to answering questions related to the activities we did, while also asking us certain questions, such as ‘what do you wear to college?’ or ‘how many best friends do you have?’ It was wonderful to see how comfortable they now felt, and their keenness to learn.

The week’s activities included doing puzzles, creative drawing and writing, a beading session and finally a dance class. A significant highlight of the Tuesday’s puzzle session was the completion of a 300-piece puzzle, something rarely achieved and which required great determination from Shilpa, Kanchan and myself. Moreover, the puzzles sparked additional vocabulary learning, such as the one of the world map, which was also useful in displaying the relative size of each country and their location, as the girls expressed their surprise at how small the UK was compared to countries like India, Russia and China.

The beading session planned for Thursday was met with a great deal of enthusiasm and a beautiful variety of bracelets and necklaces were produced by the end of the day – purple and green flower beads proving to be a very popular choice. After every girl was content with her matching set of jewellery, we took time to pour over some of the fashion magazines we had brought from London, using them as a means to incorporate the vocabulary of other items, such as ‘diamond earrings’ and ‘a ring with a green gem’. It was sweet to see how much interest the girls had for pictures of the Queen and her ‘fancy outfits’ as Sangeeta remarked.

Friday came around quickly and this was a day of dancing and fun. Rather than taking our usual group, we had classes 10 and 11. Spending time with new girls each Friday would be an excellent way for us to meet each of the seventy pupils at the boarding home and classes 10 and 11 had no less enthusiasm than our usual group. We initially taught them our two dances – the Macarena (which proved a huge hit) and the classic YMC. After a few encores of the Macarena the girls took it upon themselves to teach us some native dances, which ranged from traditional Rajasthani dances to a mesmerising snake dance. Our attempts at these elicited a lot of laughter but it was clear that the girls loved teaching us and we certainly had fun. By the time we had to go home it felt as though the week had flown by and we could not wait for another one to begin.