On Saturday, I attended the welcome back picnic at OSC. During the picnic the service group, Room to Read, ran a second hand book stall, selling books to the OSC community as an endeavor to raise money for Vidyaloka School’s library construction project. As a service leader I contributed to setting up, manning and packing up the group’s stall before and after the picnic (see image 1). I also contributed ideas for raising money, such as suggesting to abolish the fixed price per book but rather simply ask for donations for the books, allowing people to pay as much or as little as they wished. This ended up raising more money than they would have with a fixed price (of Rs. 250), because most people in the OSC community value a book to be worth more than that, therefore paying more than that price even if it’s through a donation system.
Overall the book stall was a success, where the Room to Read team sold most of the books they had, raising over Rs. 36,000.
Other than the welcome back picnic, Room to Read had also held a few service sessions where they planned for the picnic as well as starting English lessons with Vidyaloka school.
During their very first service session of the year, the other leaders and I gave all the newer members of the group a brief on what Room to Read is all about and what our goals are for this year. Once that was done the younger and newer members worked with Ms Lockwood to plan the picnic while the leaders and some older members (including myself) went to greet the children from Vidyaloka school. Once with together, I read some of the children English books which they chose from the primary school library (image 2).
Every Tuesday since the first session the service leaders have been holding meetings with Ms Lockwood where they reflected on how the previous session went and planned the next one. Over the course of the next sessions, the Room to Read crew has continued with their work to improve Vidyaloka school students’ conversational English, through a number of methods such as flashcards, talking about their interests (likes and dislikes), emotions and describing peoples clothes.
Based on previous sessions, I suggested (during a Tuesday planning meeting) that instead of presenting slides and trying to engage conversation with the kids as a large group, we should be split into a number of smaller groups where there can be a larger conversational element and all the RtR members will also be more engaged with the teaching. As a whole RtR plans to continue working on the childrens’ conversational English as well as some of their writing skills, through work in small groups, slides, activities, and talking about various basic topics.
Learning Outcomes:
- LO2: Demonstrates initiative to discuss, evaluate and plan student-led activities.
- LO3: Demonstrates undertaking challenges in order to develop new skills.
- LO5: Demonstrates his ability to work collaboratively with others and recognizes the benefits of doing so.
- LO6: Demonstrates engagement with global issues such as multilingualism.
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