Drama rehearsals: We're doing good!

Altering the story and acting : we're behind time

After the story telling sessions, Naowed and I started the part of changing the story. At that time, we were a bit behind time comparing to the other group, and this made us speed things up a bit.

We spent one sessions changing the names of the characters and some scenes in the story. This cost us quite a lot of time, as they had so many different ideas for the story, which was quite unexpected from us. And we had to pay for that. In the next session, we had to restart the whole changing story thing again! But this time, it was quite effective, as Naowed found most of their interests in Harry Potter. Thus, we chose to change the story into "Arthur's Halloween", and this motivated most of them. Yet we still had to pay the price of the time.

In the next session, we tried to help them in their acting, but we observed that their reading skills were not good and needed improvements.

Therefore, on the next two sessions, Naowed decided to use these sessions to improve the students' reading skills. We spent time make them read, find their mistakes such as pronounciation, eye contact, ...and then we could help them to improve, yet this was quite hard. We succeeded, at last. However, this was costly; by the time we finished, there were only 2 more sessions left, and we hadn't started to help them in their acting!

We are now urgently trying to finish everything on time before their actual performance next week. Hope it's going to be fine ... [-o<

Story telling sessions =)

In these sessions, we were to tell them a story, and then spend a few more sessions with them for story changing and acting.

We decided to divide the whole group into 2 smaller groups. Naowed and I take one, while Huan and Shadman take the other groups. We were supposed to use different stories for each group, and then have kind of a "competition" between the two groups.

Naowed and I chose to tell them the story "Arthur's April Fools" - a story that Naowed have read when he was small, but I haven't. Therefore, in the few sessions that we spent to help them read and understand the story, I was quite inactive, and I needed time to follow the story. Still, by helping them reading the story out loud and explaining the expressions and words in the story, I had a better grasp of the story after one or two sessions.

After theses sessions, we found out that most of them could read quite well, yet some of them couldn't, because of the destiny that they were bonded to when they were born. Because of this, we decided to sclow things down a bit, and focused on helping them with their reading.

Funnier than I thought!!

Today, I really had great time with in Tanglin School in the first session of Research Education Service Learning. The ice-breaking session went on quite well. During the time when we went to the school, I was very anxious to see the students. However, I also felt very nervous. "What if the games are not interesting enough ?", "what if the students don't like us ?" those were the thoughts that came to my mind. It was funny that when we began the ice-breaking, I was quite shy whereas many students turned out to be very confident. In my opinion, the games organised in the session helped us a lot to know more about each individual student, both name and personal character. For example, in the shopping game, the players were required to memorise the names of the items respectively. We also joined the game. To me, it was quite a difficult game even for normal people, but the students did very well. Also, through the games such as "the statue" or "the rope game", we could identify not also the students who are confident and good but also those who are shy and slower than others. I was very impressed by Chee Keong, Nurul and Marcus: they showed great confidence and mental ability when playing the games. Beside this, students such as Aquillah or Faris would need more encouragement. Overall, I think the ice-breaking was a really good time for us to get a rough picture about the students so that we would have appropriate plans for future sessions.

Games!!!

In my first session at Tanglin School in my Research Education Service Learning, I was amused by the students there, especially during the time when my group play games with them. First of all is the memory game, where each person must memorize other people's vegetables and fruits that they spoke out before, and add in the sequence one of their own. It was a good chance for us to memorize their names and make friends with them. The game was fun and entertaining for them and us also. I was quite surprised by their ability to remember things, as they memorized easily the things that were spoken, and even our names, while I only could remember about half of their names.

The next game that we played together was the rope game. We instructed them how to play, which was simply held the rope, bent down, trusted friends, then said out their names and hobbies. We didn't participate in the game with them; instead, we stood outside and took notes of their names and hobbies. Although it was effective, I personally think that we should have joined in the game to mingle with them.

We continued the session with the statue game. We became the statue, and they used verbal power to instruct us what to do. We were quite surprised that some of they were very active, not as shy as what we initially thought. And they came up with many interesting posts and ideas also. It was very fun and relaxing. We actually enjoyed playing with them.

We ended up the session with the game of cherades. In this game, we told one of them to act out the actions we told that person, and them made the others guess what that person was doing. They were quite clever, they got it almost everytime. I could see that they were enjoying the fun and excitement of the game, as all of them put in efforts to infer and think of the ations.

All in all, I think that the games in the first session was very effective in getting to know them more and get along with them better in the future.

Not so different...

My post is a personal reflection of the first meeting of the students. It was not really the start of our sessions but it was just for the preliminary idea of what we would have to do to carry out this project.
As I obsereved the class in the corner from where I was, I have to say that I was surprised. Surprised in the sense that they were definitely not what I expected them to be. They were extremely normal students (not that I had the preception that they were abnormal). However, it was a different scene then what was already painted in my mind. Maybe I thought that they would be shy, quiet, uninterested and totally lost. But, contrary, they were asking questions & actively participating in their class (maybe with more enthusiasim than we RI kids have for our lessons). But most importantly, they were having fun in their learning. And don't we all want a little fun while we learn? So as i said in the title: these new students are not so different...

A lot of new students...

Today was somewhat scary, fun, disappointing, amazing, etc. etc. We just had our first trip to Tanglin School. Upon arriving there, the wildly coloured buildings hit our eyes like fireworks. We went in and watched the students of the Book Club reading about a story of a migrant. Some were very lively, while others were slightly more withdrawn. They were as old as us- some older- and definitely at least twice the age of the kids we had been expecting to teach. Still, we were up for a challenge.

At the End of their lesson, we sat down at the table in the middle of the room and did some discussions with Mrs. Suren and Ms. Soh as to what we we basically planning to do, our teaching format and what we would do the next week. We got out of the class feeling apprehensive and scared. The scariest thing was that unlike our previous RE projects,our mistakes would be felt than a far wider range of people than us. Well we'd have to wait till the next week to actually understand our situation.