We have now done two in person sessions of the Cultural Exchange service group. I am writing this post about them together because in many ways they were part of the same process. The group of Rural Children was divided into two groups, and we did the same presentation for both groups. For that reason I think of them as the same unit.
On the first session the rural schools arrived at the car park ten minutes early, and Matthew and I only managed to get there five minutes early (he was slightly ahead of me.) That meant that they were already there, and we had to begin organizing immediately. We messaged the rest of the group to go to our first point, and lead the visitors across the school to where we would begin presenting.
Our agenda went like this:
Introduction and snack in the SMPR (Secondary Multi-Purpose Room) until 16:00,
Divide into two groups lead by myself and Matthew at 16:00 then move into two other classrooms (both in the language acquisition department) and do activities with the visiting children until 16:25.
The introduction went well, I gave a slow and simple speech about my hopes for the program and some history of it after Matthew gave a technical introduction, then we directed them to the provided snacks and we started going around making small talk. Or rather, the rest of the group started making small talk. One of my big difficulties in life is that I suck at small talk, so this section was very difficult and awkward for me. Fortunately it ended fairly quickly.
At 16:00, Matthew named all of the students in his group and they started moving, and after they were all out I took everyone who remained to the other room. Helping me lead my group was Aran, who is actually one of the service Co- Leaders but for this session he let me take the lead.
Our first session was about introductions to yourself and your family. We had the kids right their names on nametags and then introduce what emotion they were feeling.
The plan had been to do an activity that involved saying your name plus and adjective that alliterated with it, but as a person whose name starts with Z I know that to be a bad game so we skipped it and went right to emotions. I mentioned that I was somewhat worried about what would happen because it was a new experience for me.
The second activity involved everyone standing in a circle and saying how many people where in there family, their siblings ages, number of pets and that type of thing. With the first group we had them throw a ball, but that didn’t work so well because they kept throwing it to students from their own school so it kept going to the same people. With the second group we had them hand the ball around the circle which went much better.
We didn’t actually have that much time for activities, and they were still incredibly shy and all actions were tentative ones, but still it was a start and we got everyone participating. Next session is about Halloween and is much more interactive, which hopefully should let us have a better second session.