UM CKPC Service Learning Team went to Gan Tuan Primary School in Guandong, Congjiang County, Guizhou for 3 days of volunteer teaching in December 2018, resulted with outstanding achievement. In February 2019, the service learning team recruited new members within the college with more than 10 candidates in the interview. Finally, 5 were selected as new members. Adding to the 9 original members, there are 14 members in total. After the Chinese New Year, the service learning team started preparing the teaching plan, including English, science and music. Through the practice teaching, they were strengthened and united as a team. After several months of preparation, the service learning team went for another volunteer teaching at Gan Tuan Primary School at the beginning of June.
1. English Lesson
Gan Tuan Primary School provides only one English lesson per week for Sixth graders while there are no English classes for other grades. In last year’s volunteer teaching, we discovered that the children are highly interested in learning English. In this volunteer teaching, we provided English lessons to all classes, started with teaching ABC. Notably, we integrated moral nurturing with English activity teaching. Besides teaching English alphabets, the service learning team let the students drew an English name and teach them how to read and write them on the first day. Each child had a different English name and they were very interested in it. Very soon, they remembered their own names. They were not reluctant to learn English. The fifth graders even gave us a surprise. On the third day after school, they said “See you tomorrow” altogether. Surprisingly, they learned the sentence by themselves.
2. Music Lesson
We taught "cup song" during the music lesson, which used the sound of hitting the cup as the beat as a kind of popular music with rich texture. When learning the cup song, each student would have a cup. This also solved the problem of sharing the same water cup within the whole school. Moreover, in order to let the students have a thorough understanding of music, we introduced to them different musical instruments and the sounding principle.
3. Science Lesson
Students tried different hands-on experiments including green bean sprouting, light refraction, and kaleidoscope. They liked these experiments very much. Due to the lack of teachers, their general studies lessons usually only covered textbooks with few hands-on opportunities.
In the afternoon of the last day, the service learning team held a party for the whole school as a finale. The Q&A included what the students have learned in the lessons. The prizes include the Greeting Cards, which were collected from visitors on CKPC Open Day back in April. In the traditional letter writing activity, the “brothers” and “sisters” of the team received a total of 270 letters.
The principal and teachers of Gan Tuan Primary School were deeply appreciated by the activity teaching method of the service learning team after witnessing the children’s enthusiastic learning attitude. The teachers of Gan Tuan Primary School were aged over 40. They mainly use the traditional method of teaching by the textbook and rarely use the big touch screen. They hope to have more opportunities for exchange and communication in the future, including teacher training, so that teachers can also learn new teaching methods.
The service learning team hope that with new hardware and teaching environment, they can continue to bring new ideas to the children of Gan Tuan Primary School and to inspire their vision for future. At the same time, it allows the service learning team members to practice and grow continuously. |