Lol i postponed my reflections mainly because i completely forgot to do it... but since it's too late to turn back time I might as well use that as an advantage to do my reflections.
Today concluded Lesson 2 of our RESL project to educate a group of kindergarteners from Little Wings about the beauty of art. We made significant progress from Lesson 1, in the way that we were able to control the children better. From Lesson 1, I personally felt that the children were not under our control at all during the lesson. It felt as if the class were divided into several groups, each of them in their own world. There was a small minority who were super super shy, and would not utter a word if not prompted. There were the rowdy children who were fighting, running around, whatnot. It was quite a mess. Only when our teacher-mentor came in and talked to them with diction did we realise what we were doing wrong.
From the second lesson, we decided to appeal to the natural instincts of the children, and to enforce way more discipline with the children. As our teacher mentor was not here today, we were up against a formidable challenge to engage the children with our 75 minute lesson plan... We got mixed results. First, we had an improvement in controlling the kids. Letting them know who's the one in charge by speaking with force and diction enabled us to command the children's attention and elicit certain responses from them. The Sing-a-long session was quite successful, as the perpetually-linked peer pressure spread like bonfire within the class; as a few people sang along with us, everyone began to sing along and it was our first taste of success with interacting with the kids.
Another plus point was that the kids were interested in dealing with art. They were enthusiastic and responded with positive decorum.
HOWEVER. BIG HOWEVER.
Due to lack of spick-and-span preparation, we did not anticipate certain events. Firstly, was the making of the tissue box guitar itself. We did not expect the hassle in wrapping the tissue boxes, and had to settle with 7 tissue boxes, with just 1 box to be shared among 2 people. It was the best way to deal with our situation as we dismissed the idea of helping them to wrap the boxes as we thought that we would teach them to be independent. However, time constraints forced us to do otherwise.
Other than that, we managed to convey our overall message to the kids, that art can be found easily, only if you look hard enough. A huge improvement from lesson 1, as we managed to finish all 7 guitars.
Now looking forward to lesson 3, which we hope will be a step higher than lesson 2.
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