But for the children inside, some of the old fears just won't go away.

"They get scared if they hear a voice on a loudspeaker," says teacher Jintana Jampa. "They think it's from the tsunami warning tower."

Children around the Indian Ocean were among those most severely affected by the events of last December 26. Many were orphaned by the catastrophe, while others were dealt a trauma that persists one year on.

"In some ways, children have made a remarkable recovery," says Andrew Morris from the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Thailand, where an estimated 1,200 children had both parents killed.

"You talk to children now who have lost parents, had this horrendous experience, and they are coping well," he says. But he adds: "Psychologically, they are never going to return to the point they were at before the tsunami."

In Indonesia's battered Aceh province, where more than 165,000 people were killed or are missing, as many as 20,000 kids are believed to have suffered psychological trauma while 2,155 lost both their mother and father.

Roberto Benes, who heads UNICEF's child-protection unit in the main town of Banda Aceh, says that one way to measure how the children are progressing is to look at the pictures they draw.

"Immediately after the tsunami, they were a representation of the tragedy -- a big wave, people in the water, houses wiped out," Benes says. "Today, children are drawing a more normal scenario."

But he cautions that it is too soon to know what long-term impact the catastrophe will have on their lives.

"We don't know what are going to be the long-term psychological consequences of the tsunami because we have never had in history such a violent natural event," he says.

"The fact that the tragedy came from the sea with a clear visual element has impacted a lot."

In the Acehnese village of Keude Panga, where a number of teachers and pupils died in the killer waves, Marzalinta says her students often have difficulty concentrating.

"They are not so serious about studying now," she says. When it rains or gets windy, she says the children react with the same question: "What's happening now?"

Experts say that the difficulty in coping with the trauma of the children has been compounded in places where there is no long tradition of dealing with mental-health issues.

Hiranthi di Silva, director of mental-health services in Sri Lanka, says that his country's health ministry had no files for many of the children affected by the disaster.

"Our mental health programme is very new," he says. "We have no records before or after the tsunami."

One bright spot is the support provided by the World Health Organisation, which has funded a programme to help traumatised individuals in regions hit by the tsunami.

"If the community support is good, (affected children) will learn and adapt," says Lata Caleb, director of the tsunami programme of Save the Chilren in India, where the government has banned the adoption of tsunami orphans in favour of keeping kids in their familiar surroundings.

"If it is poor, then it is hard to tell how they will overcome the loss," she says. "It is community support alone which can act as a cure to their woes."

Yet many of the affected children in Asia come from communities where the tragedy's death and devastation has only added to the day-to-day psychological scars they endured from violent conflicts that have surrounded them.

In Aceh, it was an uprising against the government that has only recently ended. In Sri Lanka, the conflict involving the Tamil Tiger rebels continues.

According to UNICEF, the Tigers recruited more than 100 children as new child fighters in the first four months after the tsunami, nine of them survivors of the catastrophe.

One year on, even those kids in less troubled circumstances are sometimes still finding it difficult to cope.

"My son has nightmares about typhoons, about mountains crashing," says Erna Wati, a mother of four in the village of Gado outside Banda Aceh. She says he still dreams about meeting his grandmother, who died in the catastrophe.

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