22S05

Our project was on the elderly. We decided to do karaoke and bingo with them at the centre. But before all the activities started, we conducted a small ice breaker activity called pass the parcel. This game requires each person to tear one layer of newspaper off an object that is covered in many layers of newspaper. The winner of the icebreaker is when an elderly or a student gets the wrapped object. During the karaoke, we played national day songs, chinese and malay songs for the elderly to sing, such as rasa sayang and One Singapore. We also allowed the elderly to choose their favorite songs to sing together. For bingo, we bought bingo cards from 1 through 75 and used a random number bingo generator to help choose numbers. Lastly, We gave out bracelets made by the class to every elderly so that they could bring it back home to remember the amazing experience they had.

Overall, the class enjoyed the process and the experience of helping the elderly as they thought spending time with the elderly was meaningful and fun. Also, they were able to bond more as a class because they had the same objective in mind and were required to work together to plan the activities. Being able to see the smiles and hear the laughter of the audience really brought us joy and warmth. Furthermore, some of us that went to the centre enjoyed ourselves so much we were willing to go again.

However, there were some issues during the project. One prevalent issue was the language barrier. Some elderly spoke Malay and chinese.This caused our planning to be difficult as we had to choose songs that we were not familiar with. We did not know how to speak proper Malay and had issues speaking in Chinese as some of us did not understand what they were saying. Also, at the start, some elderly were not participative and did not respond to us when we tried to talk to them. The elderly were often distracted and hence this caused our conversation with the elderly to be tough and required a lot of time to try to reply to them. Luckily, the vendor at the centre was able to converse with everyone and spur the elderly to become more responsive. Fortunately, everyone was able to talk to the elderly and the elderly looked ecstatic while doing the activities. Because of this, we were able to learn how to be more resilient and were able to push through all the challenges to make this project successful. Also, we learned to be patient as the elderly required some time to process the information we gave them. Thus, we learned to take it slow and be understanding towards others, growing our ability to empathise.

Lastly, we learned how to plan an activity for others. We learned how to plan a plan. We had to think about how much we could do in such a small amount of time and what are the resources required in the activity. Additionally, we had to buy resources and sources for the cheapest ones around us. This taught us how to network and find valuable information online.