“English is a universal language that connects people all around the world and knowing the language can open up many life opportunities for you.” – Diskha
According to Keystone Academic Resources, English is understood by one in every five people worldwide. 67 other nations have adopted English as their official language, while 27 other nations from Western Europe to Asia adopted it as the official second language. While English has officially became a second language in our country and may not seem like a privilege since it’s very basic, that is not the case for children in marginalised communities, like our beneficiaries from Rumah Sentuhan Budi in this visit, who had minimal access to basic English education due to lack of resources and facilities.
“From my experience visiting the children and observing the surroundings, in my honest opinion, I think they still need more resources to access basic education on English Proficiency,” Aufa emphasised. This is an urgent matter that needs to be addressed immediately. Rather than a medium of communication, English has now become a basic life skill that everyone should have for job-seeking, to succeed in multiple professions and to be used in daily conversations. It leaves a significant impact on these children, as young generations and the future of our country. “We can put colourful posters of simple English sentences on the living room and bedroom walls. It is important for young kids to learn visually, especially things that are new to them. Plus, this method can stimulate their brains to speak and understand simple sentences on a daily basis.”
Hence, the main objective of Small Changes’ Project Beanstalk 2nd Visit to Rumah Sentuhan Budi on 18th June 2023 is to highlight the importance of access to English education within underprivileged communities with a more holistic approach, touching on 4 modules namely English Writing, Reading, Speaking and Listening. Here, we have Aufa Nabila, our facilitator for this visit who is also pursuing a Masters in Art & Design while working in an NGO and Diksha Suri, our public relations and social media manager, to brief us on the details pertaining to this visit.
After an ice-breaking activity for everyone to mingle around and get to know each other, we kickstarted the session with the first module of the day – “Oh My English! Writing” at 9.30AM. This module is where children will gain a rudimentary knowledge about simple sentence constructions from “subject + verbs + object” with pronouns like I, you, he and she. For instance, “Nana lends a pencil” or “Abu cooks a meal”. To grasp the children’s attention with a more creative approach, we’ve incorporated some elements of charades and “fill in the storyline” as well! After a short tea break, we moved on to our next module – “Oh My English! Reading” at 11.30AM, which is specifically designed to navigate the children on reading fluently via reading aloud a passage, understanding what it means and count the words per minute. This also entails more interactive hands-on sessions like cutting out the pictures to indicate a life cycle of a plant in a circle ranging from seed, roots, stem, leaves to flowers, and drawing out conclusions based on the stipulated storyline.
We have our penultimate module – “Oh My English! Speaking” after lunch at 2.30PM. The aim is to create a safe space and a conducive environment where children feel comfortable to speak without being judged by sending a message that grammar is not important as long as people can understand what you want to convey. The three sub-modules under “Oh My English! Speaking” includes completing a sentence one word at a time on a mahjong paper based on the content of a video, singing a song and playing a “guess what happens next” game and lastly, the “Chinese Whisper” game, where the committee will whisper a short sentence to the first person in the group until it reaches the last person, who will then share the full sentence out loud. Project Beanstalk 2nd Visit was wrapped up with our last module – “Oh My English! Listening”, which was followed by 3 sessions of interactive exercises hosted by Aufa! The children were required to guess the answers based on the stipulated audio of 20 sounds from different animals, answering 2 sets of quizzes within 2 minutes and audio recordings of relaxing sounds like the sound of forest and sound of waves were played as well for the children to picture themselves in the stipulated environments.
To wrap up this article for Project Beanstalk 2nd Visit, the author would like to reiterate the impact of volunteerism. “Most definitely volunteering is important, I usually have the thought process of – perhaps I can’t change the world but I change someone’s world; and It’s amazing every time I think about it. I think this can be achieved by volunteering,” adding on, Diksha further explained how she found her volunteering experience meaningful, especially after seeing the children breaking out into smiles and laughter, which gives her a different kind of satisfaction.
“I learned that volunteerism requires you to have a down to earth attitude and mindset. This is because volunteering forces you to be outside of your comfort zone and beyond your own bubble. It makes you open up your eyes, ears and mind to see something that you never learned in your textbook or even in your classroom,” Aufa said as she encouraged more youngsters to start volunteering as the experience is truly priceless.
“Are you an introvert but enjoy doing something good?
Go volunteer.
Want to connect, socialise and mingle with others?
Go volunteer.
Or maybe you want to make an impact for someone?
Start volunteering.
But you don’t know how?
Connect with Small Changes today!”
Written by: Nikkita Koh
Designed by: Puteri Nur Suraya