Thanks to the opportunity to go to Taitung for the volunteering program last summer vacation, I made up my mind teaching those wonderful children again through the computer. In order to prepare myself well and get to know other people in this group better, I attended every activity they held, or I should say we held, so far; and both the activities and members are really impressive, inspiring and energetic.
The activities that happen during every semester include the first gathering, which was also the biggest one, usually talking place on October 10th every year. Everyone made their wishes about what they want to do for children and themselves like bringing happiness and caring or making improvement together, and started to know each other as well as how the program works. Moreover, teachers or principals from the schools which we work with would come to introduce the features and personalities of their students whom we teach and interact with, to give volunteering teachers some pieces of advice on teaching or getting along with children.
Following up were other activities held in every month called “monthly cultivated training.” There was one in the early November at a conference room in the library. The activity started with volunteering members’ sharing about how we get along with children during the class, how we do when students throw some troubles like playing the computer games covertly (since we meet each other through the computer, we cannot know what kids are doing if we don’t observe their expressions and responses carefully) without concentrating on the courses, and how we prepare the lessons before the class starts. One of the members said that she often uses colorful pictures to spice up the texts and raise children’s interests on the class. Another male member likes to praise children and talk to him in Taiwanese since his student likes it, which he says will help them on communication and the relationship between them. Also some of them have similar problems: their students are too energetic and sometimes they just cannot control them. This sharing lasted about half an hour, since there were some had class later that day and another interesting program was waiting for us: we invited a story-teller from 花婆婆繪本館 of 3&3 International Education Corporation to teach us about picture books.
The story-teller was a female, who works at the 3&3 institute telling stories for a long time. She has a talent on telling stories I think, because people of my age were all attracted in the story she told that day, as if she had magic power that could control people. She started with a cute story, “農場的瘋狂事件,” which is of course related to a farm. However, what does “crazy” here mean? What kind of crazy event could happen to a farm? The story-teller said that we can raise this kind of questions to inspire children and force them to think. She asked her audience to observe the cover carefully and speak out what we found. At first, we all simply told her what’s on the cover, such as a cow, trees, and a farm. She asked: “Then what do you think the cow is doing?” We began to understand that we didn’t do observing at all, instead, we just “watched.” So there was one told her the cow is waiting for something and then we did this on the following stories. The story-teller explained that what we did is called “read the pictures,” not just see the picture, which is good for cultivating the ability of observation and concentration. Also, we can ask children to draw a picture about what they think of the story or the ending, making story-telling more fun. I later used all the suggestions she gave on story-telling to my student of this program and the process was really great that both the kid and I had lots of fun. However, I’m still too shy to act out the story with exaggerating facial expressions and funny intonation like the story-teller did, and my student even did much better than me! Haha!
On December the second, another cultivated training was held in SF building. During the first period, we watched some videos which were about some members teaching their students on the computers (every class we joined would be recorded). All of them were doing great jobs that they were well-prepared for their students, such as the PowerPoint files, eBook, or some disciplines that can work well through the technical world. And then again we invited another female story-teller from the same institute to share some experiences with us in the next period. This time the activity ran differently that the audience had to tell the story, and then the story-teller gave us some hint on how those stories were about. We students read three stories of different kinds by turns with exaggerating intonations and according to the story-teller’s instruction, we need to give some questions about the stories. Although this time I didn’t listen to interesting stories told by the teacher, I think this story-teller shared some further suggestions to us. For instance, we talked about “life education” in one of the story. She mentioned that we can bring the concept into children’s lives that we can prevent some danger from happening and that’s what we should do, as people who work for education.
Finally here came the end of the semester. The last activity was in the early January, which happened recently, held to end up this semester with a good memory. I attended the pre-preparation to help them with the props like firecrackers and spring festival couplets which were hung on the occasion. On that day, we had lunch together, watching the video that recorded what we did during this semester, including meeting our children on the campus.
Then I would like to talk about our members. One of the members who often be called to demonstrate is my classmate, Tiffany, who I have to say is good at this field and I believe that she will be a good teacher in the future. She is always so passionate about those children that she often talks about them and be proud of her student. I’ve seen the text she prepared for her students which were so abundant that even I would like to be taught by her! And she always has her fair and disciplined ways to treat children. Being around her so often, I feel that I’m influenced by her I’m lucky to have such a good friend for me to learn from.
I’m willing to work with them in the future for a long time because we all bear the same thing in our minds: those children and the education.
三之三文教機構 http://www.3-3edu.com.tw/
繪本花園 http://children.cca.gov.tw/garden/
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