Community service was an activity wherein I had to teach arts and crafts to children from SMC schools. I was always taught to “give to those who have nothing to give to me” and thus by sharing my knowledge of arts and crafts I aim to leave theses children with their right brain functioning equally to their left brain (as they might be learning math and logical subjects in their schools already.). In this activity, I achieved LO 1, LO 4, LO 5, LO 6.
LO 1- I identified my strengths while teaching children. arts and crafts. I learned that I was good at finding alternatives to something that went wrong. For example, one time my group lacked a few ice cream sticks and we didn’t have any even in the resource box so I folded thick colored sheets a couple of times of the length and width of an ice cream stick. It served the purpose of an ice cream stick as it was as strong as it, plus the child was very happy as his craft was the most colorful in my group. Moreover, at the beginning of the activity, I thought it would be difficult for me to teach children as I am not comfortable talking to strangers but unexpectedly I was able to communicate very smoothly, without being scared or without getting nervous. This gave me the confidence to handle more than three kids and soon I was able to handle a bunch of children altogether. Sometimes when students were absent we had to take five kids to ourselves and I was pretty good at handling them. Seeing children happy at the end of every session kept me going. I could not recognize any weakness here as the ones I intended to be my weaknesses such as talking to strangers and handling a group turned out to be my strengths in this activity. Maybe doing more of such activities will help me identify my weaknesses.
LO 4- My lack of confidence made the activity difficult. Watching people my age communicated with kids very easily made me feel a little bad for myself and sorry for the kids as I was not able to make my session as interesting as the others. But as the days proceeded I kept telling myself that just for the sake of those kids I have to keep my problems and fears aside, and that did help. End of every session I knew I did a good job when I saw big smiles on every kids face.
LO 5- My introvert attitude made it quite very difficult (in the starting) to work with people whom I don’t know and specially kids. I am not very comfortable when I am surround with people and it become more difficult when I had to work with a partner. But deep down I knew it was import to work collaboratively so it is not difficult for me in the future. As mentioned above I kept telling myself that just for the sake of those kids I have to keep my problems and fears aside, and this actually helped me realize that working collaboratively isn’t that difficult, that fear was just in my mind and when I told it to calm down, it did and I was able to work properly and efficiently.
LO 6- Quality education was the issue catered in this activity. This is a global issue because quality education has great Global significance because the future of any country is dependent of its children and thus its important to give then ‘quality’ education. Being a privileged girl from a privileged family I felt a great honor in contributing to this global issue by providing quality education to underprivileged.
