1. Beyond Self

Beyond Self is a partnership with Beyond Social Services focused on enabling social progression among lower income families. As part of the team, we organise academic support programmes as well as fun and educational activities for primary school children of these families, aged 7 to 12. This is to stimulate their learning interests, thus hopefully achieving academic progression.

After the first session attended at Beyond Self, I realised that it was quite a different experience compared to the orientation trial I attended last year, before joining this Service Learning project. There were some difficulties in controlling the noise level, especially when carrying out the games. This is to be expected since children tend to get louder and noisier when playing games together. However, the noise level was too high for all the mentors to control. I learnt that active participation amongst mentors ourselves in the games is highly important. This is because if we sit in between the students, stay quiet and listen to the game instructions, the children will most likely follow us and do the same, which may reduce the noise level. Furthermore, I learnt that managing our own emotions in front of the children is very important, especially when it gets frustrating when facing naughty students or noisy situations.

Overall, since it was my first session at Beyond Self, I was unsure of what I expected and was supposed to do in the face of difficult situations. However, I believe that I can learn more through experience and become a better mentor to the children.