 We
volunteer at
Sunbeam Place
, an approved home for abused and
neglected children in need of protection or whose parents are unable
to provide proper care.
We started our first programme in 2007. It was
initially crafted to build confidence, hand-body coordination and
attention span through various activities from music & movement,
speech & drama and story-telling.
However, after a few sessions, we realised that the
programme was failing. Our young learners were running around and
were busy competing to get our attention by doing inappropriate
behaviours such as pushing and shouting. The sessions were chaotic
and raised our immediate concern that these young learners’ learning
was hindered due to inappropriate behaviours.
But, we didn’t give up.
After reviewing the curriculum, we came out with the
Thoughtful Minds© programme. The objective of this
programme is to equip the children (whom we term as Thoughtful
Juniors in this programme) with soft skills such as respecting
friends & teachers, sitting appropriately, good listening,
sharing, asking nicely etc.
The programme is based on a non-competitive system.
Each Thoughtful Junior
has a personalised checklist which they use to reflect upon their
own behaviour for the session. They also have an individualised
rewards chart that is dependent on their own effort and
determination to display the soft skills that we inculcate in
sessions.
In this one-year journey, our Thoughtful Juniors have
demonstrated better behaviours during sessions. We can now complete
all the activities planned for each session. We saw better classroom
behaviours, turn-taking and friendship among our Thoughtful Juniors,
in particularly Xi Xi and He Fei. Xi Xi is more ready to admit his
mistakes bravely and He Fei is putting in more effort to use his
speech to communicate as well as copy words from the board to his
task sheets without the help of dotted lines.
The most valuable and uplifting experience for us was
when some of our Thoughtful Juniors learnt to ignore the
misbehaviours of the other children and continued to stay focused on
their tasks. Seeing our Thoughtful Juniors progressing gradually as
well as seeing their smiles and hearing their laughter are our main
motivation to work with them.
The
journey had many trials-and- errors but it is fruitful. Now our next
challenge is can our Thoughtful Juniors apply what they had learnt
to their other peers at Sunbeam Place as well as peers
in their respective school? We think so and we will continue to work
with the children.
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