20S06

On this year Service Learning Day, our class partnered NTUC Health Senior Day Care (Serangoon Central) to plan a series of activities for elderly.

We started the session with a simple warm up for the elderly to energise them for the session.

It is then followed by ‘Gardening 101’, a presentation to teach the elderly how to grow plants such as thyme, basil, and parsley. We also provided pots, soil, and seeds for the elderly to try it on their own in a follow up activity that will be organised by the organisation themselves after our presentation.

After that, we took the elderly through a memory lane by playing guess the lyrics of some of their favorite old songs.

Lastly, we send our well wishes to the elderly through cards, which have been handwritten and sent by us prior to the session, and is distributed with the help of the staff at the centre. With that we bid our farewell to the elderly and end the session.

Overall, we feel somewhat satisfied with what we have done for this year’s SL Day given the struggles we’ve faced. Due to the circumstances of Covid-19 and safe management measures, we did not have the chance to conduct our activities face to face with the elderly in the Senior Daycare Centre. This restricted our planning to be in the form of video conferencing only, and thus severely limited the variety of activities we could plan to engage the elderly meaningfully and slightly hindered our planning process. This forced us to be more creative and think outside the box for the ideation process, and as a result, we came out as better holistic thinkers.

However, everything seemed very rushed due to the slow email response and we faced many difficulties when negotiating with the people at the elderly home. We also experienced some miscommunication on the planned activities, that we almost could not provide the necessary items on time for the activities.

On the day itself, we also faced some technical difficulties, specifically audio problems, which was addressed by using a separate laptop for audio. Furthermore, despite the initial concern over the effectiveness of this method in getting the elderlies' attention or to encourage the elderlies to participate actively, the staff centre had helped keep the energy high amongst the elderlies hence we were able to conduct our activities without much hindrances all while keeping the elderlies interested .

In the end, everything went well overall, but there are definitely some areas for improvement. One would be the necessity to have a tech run before the day itself to check for problems beforehand. Another is in the planning process as some activities did not have a suitable duration allocated to them, which was due to a somewhat inflexible programme that gives the same duration for different activities.

But despite all these challenges that we faced as a class and our shortcomings in this project, it was a job well done and hopefully we provided the elderly with meaningful activities on our SL day. It was also very heartwarming for us to see the elderly participate in our activities and really enjoyed themselves as they clapped along to the songs we played. All in all, though it is not the traditional way of service, this meaningful experience has helped our class to persevere, be creative and grow together, nevertheless.