We finally did our first session and it went out pretty well but there were a few problems that occur. Since this was our first sessions, I had already expected that these problems might show up. At least for next time, we are going to be more prepared for these situations. I was actually pretty surprised that my partner and I managed to run this first session pretty smoothly and followed the program plan pretty well. We successfully started and end the session on time without having to take out much of the program lesson, but there were a few things that didn't go well. When we were teaching these dances, there were some children that didn't participate because it was too difficult or how they couldn't hear us over the loud music or how the pace of which we were teaching at was too fast. Another thing that didn't go well was how we weren't really prepared when we leading the stretched, we didn't know what kind of stretches to do with the kids. In the next upcoming session, we will try our best to prevent these problems from happening again. We will lower the complexity of the dance and we will teach in a much slower pace. There will be a volunteer that will turn the music off when we are instructing and we will have a stretch routine all planned out for next time. We will try to instruct every children with the best of our abilities and hope the children will master the dance choreography that we are going to teach next Tuesday. The first day was awesome because it was fun teaching the children from Laura Secord and the Selkirk daycare. I have to thank the leaders of their group because they were very kind to have our back and to help us out when we were in trouble when dealing with the kids. This is the end of the week 3 reflections. Farewell!
Garry's Reflection
Week three was the first week we interacted with the kids. Honestly, it went better than I expected. Despite them being unreceptive to our attempts at icebreaking in the beginning, once we actually got dancing, the ones who could hear, listened. That brings me to what we, as leaders, messed up. It's good that Randy was there, because we had a few major, yet fixable problems. We kept the music on throughout the lesson, so we learned later that some kids actually couldn't hear what we were saying. We had one volunteer, (Kavin Trinh) but, not having a clear plan for him, we couldn't make full use of him and lost some smoothness in our running of the session. We didn't get their names down too well, so when we were talking to a specific person, it was hard to be polite about it. We also had a kid who didn't want to participate, but hopefully turning the music off during instruction and letting her hear what we're saying will help. There was also the problem of under-the-surface disorganization, because while we drew up a detailed lesson plan on what we were going to do, we didn't delegate the responsibilities beforehand, so deciding who did what was a bit messy, and I ended up doing most of the instruction, while Michael spent some time doing what Kavin's role should've been (windows, music, etc). Despite the fact we had this many issues, we've already come up with methods to fix them, which I won't post here because this reflection's already a wall of text. Our time management, on the surface, was spot-on, giving breaks at a good interval and managing to go through what we wanted to in terms of showing the kids all three styles to choose from. In the end, the kids chose disco, with shuffling a close second, so for the next week, we'll begin a choreography for those two styles. Farewell until week 4, where hopefully the wall of issues will crumble.
What is happening in this photograph? In this image, a girl (who we can't recognize due to the small-sized image) is on the ground at the sidelines due to not wanting to participate in our first session. What should be the topic of concern in this photograph and how do you think you can handle the situation next time should something like this happen again? The topic of concern in this photograph is that someone is refusing to participate in our session, showing a lack of interest. Next time, when this occurs, we will try to personally engage the person sitting out by sending one person over to find out what is causing the session to be uninteresting, and then fixing it. |