Temple School Service a set of sessions scheduled every Thursday throughout the school year, with the goal of providing an opportunity for us to engage in community service. For these sessions around 15 children are brought to our school campus from a Temple School. Currently, I serve as a co-leader in the service having participated in it for 5 years. I truly enjoy being a co-leader since I can utilize my experience, knowledge and skills to interact with children. Moreover, I really enjoy being around children and doing something good for their happiness which also provides me with a great deal of self satisfaction.
The other service leader and I organized a meeting with the other service members where we discussed the possible activities that we can carry out within this semester to enhance the impact of Temple School Service. In order to choose the most suitable activities to be done throughout this semester, we had to consider the age group of the children, the time allocated and the level of entertainment provided by the activity.
At the beginning of each service session, we start off by allowing the kids to play in the primary playground area for about 15 minutes to to get them engaged and energized. Afterwards, they are taken to the venue which depends on the activity chosen for the day. Towards the end of the session, the kids are taken to the canteen where they are treated with a snack.
During the first few sessions, we organized a session on Origami which was focused on involving the children in a tactile activity. Each group member was assigned with few children to teach them how to prepare one design. Towards the end of the session, the kids were truly enjoying and were flying planes that they made. Also, sometimes we play some physical games with the children such as duck duck goose which really enjoy or musical chairs.
One of the most interesting activities we have done with the kids is taking them to the Visual Art classroom to engage in painting with water color. They really enjoyed this activity as they had the freedom to paint whatever they wanted. I personally think that this activity was helpful in enhancing some artistic skills that these kids had. Towards the end of the session after looking at all of those beautiful paintings done by the children, it as very satisfying to see how talented these children were. Personally, I felt proud of the impact made by the Visual Art activity which went successfully as I was the one who came up with this idea and organized it.
Moreover, throughout this semester, our service team decided that we should take the kids to the library very often. In the library session, the children have the freedom to choose any of the books that they wish to look at. When looking at the book with the children, we usually discuss the colors, letters and simple things to be learnt by the kids easily since their English is not good enough. Overall, the children seemed to have enjoyed this session a lot. It was nice to see them actively participating and taking an effort to learn something new by going through the books on their own at times.
Going to the gym was one of my favorite activities we did during this semester. They had a lot of fun playing with balls and running between the cones. This activity is very important especially for the children to improve their physical skills and to become healthier. Unfortunately, this activity was done only once in semester 1 but I will make sure that this activity will be done multiple times during the next semester. One of the changes I would be making in the next gym session will be to make members of the service group in-charge of a couple of children and have an activity planned beforehand in order to make the session more organized and productive.
On 16th of October, we started our toy and stationary drive which is an annual drive organized by the Temple School Service group in order to collect toys and stationary as Christmas gifts for the children that we work with. The primary and the secondary school both could contribute in donating in this drive. This drive continued for almost a month from 16th of October to the 6th of November. We were able to collect a lot of toys and stationary as well as money donations from the students in OSC. The contributions from COMUN to the drive should also be appreciated.
On Saturday the 2nd of November, our service group took the children to the Zoo, where the kids had an opportunity to observe various kinds of animals. The children were really excited to go on this trip as for most of them it was their first visit to the Zoo. The children were actively engaged in this visit and they were constantly asking us different questions about the animals they saw. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that this was the most enjoyed session of all, as we could take the children out of our usual place into a fantastic location. Some of the money that was collected in the toy and stationary drive was used to buy the tickets for the visit to the Zoo.
On the last service session before the winter break, every service member brought different kinds of food which were distributed among the children who had a great time enjoying the delicious food. Later on, we danced, listened to music, watched cartoons and played musical chairs with the kids. It was exciting to see how children were having fun in the absence of strict instructions from us as this was the last session.
