To be honest : taking part in the Toucheng Leisure Farm's Summer Camps 2012 was the first time in my entire life to spend whole days with kids younger than 13 years old.
After all, I'm really grateful for that opportunity!
I knew that my role was to entertain kids, make their stay at the farm more diverse,
help them overcome their language barriers. I expected myself to have fun and spend my internship in an active way. What I didn't expect myself was to learn - and that's what I did.
First of all, I learnt patience:
by adapting my english to the kids' level, by repeating simple sentences over and over again before I was understood, by taking part in the same activity with most of 20 kids, during each of 3 summer camps and like a cherry on top of a cake: by giving the same lesson 3 times a day for 3 days.
When I think about it now, I also learnt respect for all teaching/education jobs. Now I'm fully conscious how much energy it demands.
I learnt that repetitions lead to excellence: it's true that exercise makes the master!
Each lesson seemed to be better then the previous one, my approach was changing, the more times I repeated the activities, the more confident I felt about them, the more efficient I was in helping the kids have fun!
I discovered that there's nothing difficult in planning your day and even a week in such a way that computer and TV stay untouched and forgotten. How many opportunities to meet new people it gives to stay outside a whole day!
I was supposed to be a teacher/teacher's assistant but it turned out that I was also taught by the kids at the same time. Those little 7 to 12-year-old people taught me to enjoy every moment, find something funny in everything and laugh the whole day, pay attention to the details and notice so much more, not to focus only on one task but stay open-minded and observe everything what surrounds me.
By giving me hugs and little gifts at the end of the camp they showed me that even if I don't feel entirely satisfied with my work, there's always someone who appreciates and that's why it's good not to be too hard on yourself.
Now I know that I can learn from everyone, no matter how old the person is.
Of course, I wasn't alone during the summer camps - I kept on being accompanied by Christina and that's how she feels about the farm's summer camps:
" The first day was really challenging for me. First of all I haven't really been teaching anybody anything in a classroom before. So that was a the first thing that I needed to overcome. I felt really prepared for the first day, and I was going to teach them about rice culture. It was however very clear to me after 3 minutes of the first group that I was not prepared at all! Their levels of english was so different and a everyone was so silent… I couldn't even make them raise their hand for the question "do you eat rice?". I didn't have enough material for the whole lesson since nobody was talking. Well almost nobody. Some of them warmed up!
After that lesson I decided that I would have to play more games with them in english, not just talk about my subject for the day, but really get them to work with me. So I started the lessons with new words for them, and then drawing a picture of the object. Then when I didn't have anymore material for them I would play "hang man", you know the game where they have to use the alphabet to guess a word and every time they pick a wrong letter I get to draw more of the man and eventually hanging him. After a person guessed a word I asked them to draw the object for me. And it seemed to make them remember the words and actually understand what it meant.
In the end it all ended up in a quiz and I got really surprised that a lot of them could remember some of the words and knowledge I taught them. Really cool!
All in all it was a very challenging experience for me but in the end I was really happy that I had this experience and I know that I will never forget! " - Christina
Kasia
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