Giving Back to the Community

Right after my morning classes, I carpooled with a few others to SMK Bangsar to meet our kids for the first time. Going into our respective classroom, I really did not know what to expect. I went to a government school myself but it was really different from the vibe and all. After settling the kids in and introducing ourselves, we started with two ice breakers. It was tough since I have not had to speak in BM since I left high school but I soon got the hang of it. Since these kids could barely understand English, we had to translate line per line. 

Some photos of that day: 

We started them off with ice breakers - Human Bingo, where they had to go around and get signatures from fellow classmates or even us if we matched with the description on the paper. As a setback, we forgot to buy small trinkets like sweets to distribute to the kids after the activity. Another ice breaker that we did was - Draw your friend. We gave them A4 sized papers to draw a friend in class and got them to guess from each drawing whose illustration belonged to who. I felt, we really got to know the personality of the kids that we will be working with. 

After all the fun and games, we gathered them around the table and introduced Choral Speaking and Jazz Chant. They got really immersed into the videos we have prepared especially the choral speaking ones. Since they liked it so much, we decided to go ahead with choral speaking. I then opened the floor to them asking what topics they would like to perform about. By then, the kids have warmed up to us and are more responsive and engaged and were shouting out topics ranging from social media to their family to the school and even pirates! 💀

Since social media had a huge amount of votes, we decided to go ahead with that and proceed. With the remaining 10 minutes, we gave them a task to go home and write us two sentences each related to social media so we could incorporate their work into the text they were going to perform. 

After the class ended, I just felt really exhausted because it has been hectic and there were a few problematic students that were either plain not interested or just would not cooperate during the hour. Hopefully, we will get a better hang of this teaching thing the following week and be more prepared to deal with them. 

Fingers crossed! 💪