Day 5
Values-In-Action Project - Education & structure building
Today, we continued our VIA project at Wat Roka Primary School. Having seen us the previous day, the students welcomed us eagerly when we arrived. Determined to maximise the time we had, we quickly began our activities, art and craft and structure building. We played several engaging games and we got to know the students. For the laying of the cement flooring, we worked collaboratively with the students and the villagers. With teamwork and hard work, we completed the laying of the cement for the classroom.
Reflection:
Reki: These are the three things I have learnt:
1) Begin with an end in mind
We learnt to set clearer goals and learn from our previous mistakes to ensure today's activities would be a successful. We completed all the planned activities such as finger puppet and the teaching of songs such as Old Macdonald Had A Farm and the Shark Song.
2) Step out of my comfort zone
Being a student councillor, I had to participate in many activities. However, there were instances where I feel I could have performed better. However, from this experience, I have learnt to take the initiative, talk to the students and the student council a lot of expectations is held but when i had a opportunity to act, i declined it so from this experience i learnt to take initiative and go on without being scared.
3) Be more open-minded
When having group discussions, it is important to hear everyone’s ideas as no one knows that maybe other’s ideas are much better than mine. In future, when having any form of discussion, I have learnt to listen, be more receptive to ideas and see things from different perspectives.
Reflection:
Wen Bin: Before the activity, I thought of how hard it would be to get the students' attention.I also thought it would be difficult to handle the students as I did not know how to speak in khmer. After the activity,I felt that my group members and I have successfully taught the students how to create paper hearts and enjoyed themselves. I have learnt how to work as a team as we need more manpower to manage a class of thirty-two. I have also learnt that I need to have more confidence to speak to others and I also have learnt that improvising on the spot is also useful as I can apply it to other projects in the future.
Reflection:
Jia Wei: Initially, I was intimidated by the prospects of having to improvise on the spot as iIdidn't think i would be able to. However,having completed the activity, I realised that improvising was not as hard and my group and I successfully managed to improvise and bond with the primary school kids. From these activities, I have learnt to have more confidence in my abilities.
Zara: Initially I wasn't really excited to do the building of the classroom because it was a very tedious and tiring work for me and I don't like this type of activity. However, once I got started, I got motivated to perform well and even better for the sake of the students that will be using it for education purposes and how the students were very proactive and started helping out as well.The students who helped out were working way faster than us and it encouraged me to work even faster too. Through this activity, it made me realised how lucky we are to have proper facilities in school easily, e.g just ask contractor to repair whereas the students here most likely have difficulty to hire a repairman or to even build their own flooring, therefore we should be grateful and not start complaining
2)We put all of our blood, sweat and energy when it came to laying the cement. We did our very best to ensure the building is completed. I feel very proud to see the result of our effort and that we managed to complete them all within just two days! Time, energy and speed is one of the factors that was affecting our progress but we got it all done at the end of the day which makes me extra proud about it because and just do our best in everything we do. If everybody cooperates and do their best, we can get things done faster(excluding the unwell members).
3) I learned that we should really be grateful of the things we have here in our school because they don't have basic facilities like fans and toilet flush so we should not complain that the aircon is spoilt. I also learnt that life is about reflecting and improvising. Although we did a lot of mistakes on Day 2, we reflected upon our mistakes and started learning basic Khmer and think faster than before therefore, the class activities ran smoothly compared to with the pre-school students. From the constructing of building, the students used canvas sheet to transfer the sand and cement mixture and that was something we didn't think of at the start and we also used the bricks to sit rather than squatting because it can get uncomfortable after some time. Lastly,I learnt that we should not take things easy and do our best in everything we do.