We did another Cultural Exchange Service Presentation. Because of the way the two groups from the rural schools coming in worked, the group we were talking to had not done the special Halloween session, and we wanted to make sure that both groups got equivalent experiences. Because it’s just the start of winter, this time we talked about the Winter Holidays.
Mostly this meant Christmas. We actually had an internal discussion about whether or not we would focus on Christmas especially or the general holiday season. I was very much in favor the latter, because the idea that there is something holy about late december is a very old idea that predates Christmas. On the other hand, mostly people celebrate Christmas or other christmas-ified holidays. We reached a compromise whereby we called it the “Winter Holidays” presentation but mostly we focused on Christmas, with a couple slides about the New Year and a couple other Holidays around the same time. I think that was a decent compromise.
Our actual plan for the session itself was fairly elaborate. We decided early on to combine both groups together- normally we split up into sessions led by Matthew and Myself, but for the specially session we decided being all together in the SMPR would be better. We brought Isa in and she played Jingle Bells on her guitar. (It was a bit of debacle, but I think it set the tone nicely.) She ended up being slightly late so we went ahead with some of the content of our slides before she got there.
Our actual slides started with some science for explaining how the Winter Solstice worked.
That is because the idea that the end of december is holy comes from the Winter Solstice- the longest night of the year is such an obviously holy time of the year, so understanding the science behind it is valuable.
Matthew and I fell into a dynamic of presentation fairly easily. He read all of the vocab slides while I read all of the context and history slides.
I do think that probably the kids didn’t pick up most of the content because of how wordy it was, but I made sure to also provide all of the information in written words on the slide so they could read them. Also, this is about helping them understand how english speakers talk, so me giving my history presentation helped that. So I think they were still useful, because I think that no matter what helping people understand things is useful.
At the end we did two activities- the other members of the OSC Service Group went around and did a vocabulary activity with the kids involving cards. That actually went pretty well, but the last thing we wanted to do was a Kahoot, and we had to cut off the vocab activity to launch the Kahoot.
The Kahoot went well and they really engaged with it, which was great. Enthusiasm and participation has been a bit of a struggle throughout the in person sessions, and it was nice to see that finally not be a problem. So I am really happy with how that went.
And now we wait- we don’t have another session until February.