Brains and the Five Senses for breakfast

Today's class at Whampoa was all about the brain. Or at least the part of the brain that focuses on our sense of sight.

The science peeps worked on the lesson plan this week. And it was fun!

Wen Cong, our volunteer from Hwa Chong junior college, began with a starter of optical illusions. The kids were really into it. One lesson we learned was that something as simple as seating arrangements can make or break a fun session. Lesson - have more print outs next time and seat the kids closer by removing the table. We'll also use more print outs next time.

With the session on optical illusions Wen Cong also introduced the idea of rods and cones- and how we perceive colour. 

Then, Ching Hua led a session on the brain. She had spent two hours researching age-appropriate reading materials and kid friendly visuals. Paid off in spades.

The kids especially loved the 'ick' factor. You want to get their attention, try saying "this is what it would look like if you sliced my head into half sideways." while you turn your head and hold up a diagram of the brain. Ching Hua got lots of "ewwwww"s but the kids were so into it.

Working with such a wide range of ages, 6-12, is challenging, in the least. And pulling together material isn't always easy when all of us have full time jobs and no curriculum development training. Today's reading materials were geared towards several age groups and we were able to divide up the kids by reading ability.

Having enough volunteers to spend one-on-one time with them today was a real treat. I worked with a 10-year-old who has a reading level of a 7 or 8 year old. She's been fairly moody lately and through her community worker, we found out that one of her triggers is when she feels she's out of her depth and the other kids are "smarter."

So today, it was just Dyana and me. No comparisons, no distractions. We got through only two or three sentences about how our ears work. But hey, I was able to devote all my attention on her, and work with her to help her really read and understand.

More to come next week. Great to have such a fabulous group of volunteers. All in all it took 5 hours from Wen Cong and Ching Hua to put together today's 2-hour program for 8 kids. That's really labour intensive. Would love to have more kids join the program - and have more consistency in attendance among the kids who do come.

Today we also had a 14-year-old who came back to volunteers. She used to be part of our program. She got some of her secondary three year-end exam results back today. She got an A2 for her English final and a B3 English average for the year. Not bad considering she was barely passing last year.

She also got a B3 for her Chinese final. I told her I was really proud of her English grade, but I also said "work harder at your Chinese OK?" She comes from a Chinese speaking family and her Chinese is really really good. So I thought that would have been a A kinda subject.

To which she replied "But I got the highest in my class for Chinese!"

Ah...assumptions.

The Cello Fellow Visits

String and percussion ruled at Whampoa this morning.

We had a great time with Leslie Tan from the T'ang Quartet and his student David. We wanted to bring music into the Whampoa sessions and Leslie's been wanting to help out for a while so this morning, the kids rocked to classical - and some not so classical - music.

Our goals: to give the kids a window into types of music and instruments they're not familiar with, have them make their own "instruments" with rubber bands, ice cream sticks, plates, string (thanks Ching-Hua for the materials) and have them make music. More importantly, we wanted them to have fun while learning and doing new things.

We tried to figure out pop music David and Leslie could play and have the kids sing along to - so we thought - Justin Beiber? Adele? In the end, the kids spontaneously broke into National Day songs accompanied by David on the violin. Surprisingly fun. And they all seemed to know those songs.

Leslie and David started by telling them about the cello and the violin - and how classical musicians were the centuries ago pop stars - kinda sorta. The pair played a waltz, and told the kids that people centuries ago would dance to the music. "Like in a club?" asked Sameer.

They played some Bach, and asked the kids of the music sounded happy or sad. (Both, at various points). Then they played a duet and engaged the kids in a discussion about partnership and collaboration.

Then it was the kids' turn. They picked up their materials to make their own instruments. And wrote several sentences about their instruments - some with the help of volunteers. We found that having the kids write "scripts" before coming up to speak made some of them a lot less hesitant than they usually were and that the quality of what they presented was a lot better as well. So - something to keep.

We gave prizes for the most interesting instrument and best presentation. Some really interesting instruments including ones that looked like a submarine, a gun (don't ask), a UFO/ drum-set, and a string instrument in which one end of a string of rubber bands was anchored to the floor with an ice-cream stick and a kid's feet while the kid plucked the rubberband for sound.

Then David orchestrated them into doing Stand By Me with voice and percussion - using the kids' newly made instruments, along with hands, feet and chests.

At the end of the class, the kids asked if Leslie and David were coming back next weekend and could they please bring other instruments as well. So, here's to next weekend - when the kids will help compose a piece of music that Leslie and David will play - along with the kids.

Will this help the kids pass exams? No.
Will this make them future musicians? Unlikely.
But if this piqued their curiousity by opening a window to something new that they'll maybe enjoy - that's something.

Not quite El Sistema, but - hey, one day.

Yes We Can

What makes a good juggler? Practice.

When you let go, amazing things happen.

Last Saturday at Whampoa, a 10-year-old who had never spoken up or answered questions in class got up and not only led her group in a presentation – she did an entire demo. Brief, to the point, and effective, Anna (all kids' names have been changed)  and her three team-mates told us to stand on one foot, and then close our eyes and continue to stand on one foot. Then she explained why it’s a more difficult to balance when you close your eyes.

Then another group got up and read an entire story they’d written - out loud, in unison. It was about an alien with 24 arms and 5 legs discovering juggling and then practicing really hard to win an intergalactic talent competition. It had a well-organised, credible plot.  Well-illustrated too.

At first I thought the 10-year-old, in the group Andy, had written the story and the rest had just drawn and coloured. It turns out that it was Shah, one of the 8-year-olds, who came up with most of the plot - and Andy was mainly the scribe.

We wouldn’t have discovered what the kids were capable of if we hadn’t let go of the agenda and improvised a little.

At the beginning of the session, we had a guest: the amazing Mickael Bellemene, contact juggler. Link here He gave the kids a preview of his gravity defying act and talked about how much he loved his craft even as a kid (didn’t like school), how much he practiced (the whole day for days on end, at one time - until he got injured) and how important it was to do things well.

Then we asked the kids to get in groups of four, come up with questions of their own, research the answers, and present - to everyone.

As with the past two sessions, we modelled the hour after Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Framework in which four kids choose their own teams, share one PC, research and discuss answers, and present. The adults stayed away unless asked to help. In our case, we discovered that when we did that, the kids tended to copy and paste facts off the web, and then present stuff they didn't really understand.

We've been working on how to get over this - and the solution turned out really differently between the two groups of kids. The volunteers on Anna’s team first helped the girls come up with a narrow enough question. From my end of the room I heard words like fulcrum, flexible, balance from Anna’s group. First-time volunteer, Beverly, engaged the normally shy Anna like no one had been able to before. She and another volunteer, Hui, helped the kids come up with progressively more biteable chunks of information they could work on. 

  

On the other end of the room, Andy's group wanted to find out how aliens juggle. They went online, found some "Roswell" / alien-sighting sites, but in the end, no one could agree if the web could tell them definitively whether aliens exist. Hence the tale of Intergalactic Creatures Have Talent. Worked out fine, in my view. 

If they two things the team took away were:

- Google doesn't know EVERYTHING - really!

- and "hey, I can write and tell a pretty darn good story!"

then we'd done some really nice work that day - both the adults and the kids.

 My lesson for the day: relax, look, listen, learn. Be amazed.

Could Robots Rule the World One Day? Another SOLE weekend.

At Whampoa, our SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environment) experiment continues. It's an education - for us the adult volunteers, the senior high-school/ junior college volunteers, and the kids.

Over the past three Saturdays, we've pretty much followed the Sugata Mitra's SOLE framework: 8-12 year olds get to choose their own groups, one laptop per four-child group to research a question, each group has a helper - the only kid in the group who's allowed to be the conduit between the group and the adults, and the adults step in only when asked/ approached.

Today's questions:
1. Why are bruises purple?
2. Could robots rule the world one day?

The second question got some really interesting answers. The kids talked, wrote stuff, and didn't seem to have a consensus. One of the girls said robots were really smart and could build / make things. And that robots could be very scary - like if they were used in wars. They decided "maybe" robots could rule the world - because they could destroy buildings and could be used as weapons.


But robots could rule the world only if humans were scared of them. "But only god can destroy the world," added one boy earnestly. The oldest kid in the group was maybe 10. And a 5-year-old sneaked in today. He was the group's illustrator. He was also the one who told us, very seriously, that the Transformers are not real. They were drawn by computers - to which a 10-year-old piped up with "CGI!"

Did the group have fun? The Robot team did.

The Bruise team got a little ... bruised because the workload ended up being lopsided and one person ended up doing most of the work. That's something we're going to have to work on.

It's a process of adjustment and tweaking. Step in too much and the groups lose their autonomy. Stand back too much and the groups wouldn't get as much out of this as they could. It's so difficult for most of us adults not to plunge in and "guide" or get involved.

Lots of other kinks to work through - but one step at a time. 

I have learned one thing though. I've realised that if I were to boil down what I wish our education system could deliver to our kids - it's Confidence, Curiousity, and the ability to Collaborate. Much more useful than chasing Cars, Condos and Country Club memberships in my view.

When I was a kid, the acceptable middle class professions were Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer. The path seemed pretty clear cut. In this century however, who knows what types of jobs the future will deliver? 10 years ago, the phrase "Social Media Strategist" hardly existed. What will work look like when these 8 year olds start their professions?

This much I do know - curiousity would propel kids to ask questions, look for answers and find ever better ways of doing things; confidence would give them the self-belief to understand they have to be masters of their destinies. And they could be the smartest kids on earth, but without enough emotional intelligence to collaborate with others, the highest IQ in the world wouldn't help a bright child live up to his or her potential.

How Do Mozzies See - and other big questions

A really astounding morning at Whampoa today!

My friend and fellow volunteer Hui-e and I attended TEDxSingapore a couple of weeks ago and saw a video of TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra talk about his experiments with Self Organised Learning Environments and the future of learning: http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

So, we tried it out at Whampoa with our 7-12 year olds. today. In a nutshell:

• Ching-Hua and Priya (both also volunteers) worked on what Mitra called the "Big" questions - aimed at piqueing kids' curiousity. The questions had to be phrased in a not too concrete manner to leave room for, well, thinking.
• We asked the kids to pick their own groups of four...one group had three because we had 11 kids today. 
• Each group selected a question from our list:
• How do mosquitoes see?
• Why's the sky blue?
• Where does petrol come from?
• Then we left them the heck alone. Kinda. Each group had a "helper" who were the only conduit to the volunteers and vice versa. So, if they had questions, the helper had to speak to an adult. If there were things the kids were unhappy with, they had to go through the helper.

I gotta tell ya - I wasn't sure where this would go. I'd been fully prepared that some kids would run around, not want to do the work, prefer to be at the playground or playing boardgames. But wow, they all got down to it.

Glowing at S-cubed. Or - fun with e.coli

Here's a Saturday with a difference.

 My friend Sierin kindly opened her lab to a small group of students. Her friend's two teenagers, my friend's teenage son, and S, a ten-year-old from the Whampao neighborhood. The agenda: show the kids how scientists make proteins fluoresce and why. She also introduced the kids to her grad students who were researching cancer. The kids could see how the fluorescent proteins acted as "tags" and how they were solving real world issues. Three hours of microscopes, pipettes, e.coli, agar, and anatomy lab time (that was where the microscope was. And the kids knocked down Mr Skeleton - but that's another story).

The older kids had already been taking biology - so, no problem there. Another friend Ching-Hua, from IBM Research, did some extra " translation" for S  - helpful for me too! We were worried that it was all too much for S - but today, a staffer at Beyond Social Services told us how on a recent outing, S told her all about what she saw and did at the lab. S is also writing about it in her personal "newsletter." 

My thought- nevermind if  S didn't get all the ins and outs of e.coli and proteins (I didn't!). She had fun, she learned, she's interested.

A related note - I came across a TED Talk by 2013 Ted Prize winner Sugata Mitra. He's been experimenting with kids self-learning in Indian villages by plonking PCs in holes in the wall and coming back to find the kids were teaching other kids to use the computers - with no adult intervention. He then upped the ante is slight dose of adult involvement aka British Grannies.

He's now experimenting with Self Organised Learning Environments in which kids, in groups of four, are armed with one computer and a "helper"go researching Big Topics like "Why are whales the largest mammals on earth." And the kids research and present. Post-its, markers - and a framework for us adults. 

Check it out at http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html

We're going to try this out at Whampoa. We'll let you know how it goes. 

Meanwhile...we've received feedback from parents that the kids go home saying that they played games and had fun. Parents want to know "why isn't there more rote learning?" I guess we're doing something right. Next step - convince the parents that fun+learning = more effective.

New Quarter, New Program - "ish"

Different (learning) Strokes for Different Folks

It's been an interesting first quarter at the Whampoa Learning program. We received government funding for a reading program and it came with books, lesson plans, games, worksheets, and a trained teacher.

For an entirely volunteer-run learning/ literacy program serving a community in which the kids come from families that don't speak English at home,  those resources were really welcome. Now, that 20-week program's just finished, we've learned a lot. My personal takeaway: materials are just one element of any program. It's really about the individuals: the students and the volunteers.

Having books that were adjusted to 10 or so different reading levels is fab. Having a readymade resource meant untrained volunteers like us (mostly corporate people or high school students) didn't have to go the web looking for what we thought was the right level of material.

The worksheets we were given provided a great framework - but man...which 6-12 year-old would want to spend Satruday morning doing more worksheets - black and white ones at that! The lesson plans that came with those were okay...they were kinda  - dry and academic. (They tried). Again - why come in on Saturdays to do more of the same?

The games: now THOSE were winners. They were board games/ matching games...aimed at having kids learn how words are formed, what letters sound like...and for kids who come from families who don't really speak English, those have been a lot of help and fun.

We also had a KPI that there was no way we could have met: 75% attendance. And ours is a non-compulsory program comprising a mish-mash of neighborhood kids of varying abilities and levels of interest. And believe me - academics is not an interest. Kids were free to come or not come - depending on whether their parents felt it was important, whether they woke up on time that day, whether they felt like coming, whether there was food on the table...a myriad reasons.

We had a class list of about 40 kids of which about 6-12 would show up on any given weekend. And they weren't always the same kids. Absenteeism was a huge issue. Because it meant the previous week's work couldn't be built on. And it also meant that volunteers often outnumbered kids. Or vice versa. Neither provided a good learning environment.

So, now that our 20-week program is done, we're keeping the books, the games, and we're chucking out the worksheets and the uh...regimented lesson plans. The program directors also did something really really key. They culled the kids.

Here's what was different today:

The staff of the organisation we volunteer for, which includes trained social workers and community workers, went through the list to work out which kids should be part of the program. The kids had to want to be part of the program, had to be able to work with others in groups, and we also needed their parents' support and commitment. So, from 40 kids, we now have a list of 15 - of which we're targetting a regular attendance of 10 per week.

We had 8 kids today, almost all of whom showed up on time. On previous weekends, most of them would saunter in 20 minutes late.

Today we started with "Phonics Charade" in which a pair of kids in one team would be given a letter or a pair of letters. Say "E" or "CH". The kids would need to act out a word that started with the letter/s and the team would guess what the word, letter, and sound were.

Then, we got the kids to do some debate prep. Today's motion: Exams are a neccesary part of school. Interestingly, the kids and volunteers self-selected and were pretty evenly divided. Volunteers provided discussion scaffolding to broaden the arguments beyond "Exams aren't neccesary because we don't like them." (Yeah kid, I didn't either. I feel your pain.) Next session, the kids will continue the discussion and present their points in their groups - in whatever way, shape or form. Skit, rap, collage - whatever - it doesn't matter. As long as it's communicated.

Then came reading time. Or, the kids could choose the board games. Most of them chose reading.

In all, a pretty peaceful and productive morning. The kids were the "right" kids. They wanted to be there. So, we're OK for now.

In the meantime, the Centre is working on an assessment program based on Gardner's Multiple  Intelliegences: verbal/ linguistic, logical/mathematical, spatial/ visual, bodily/ kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=SG&v=l2QtSbP4FRg&hl=en-GB.


His theory is that human beings have different ways of processing and learning information. Our current education system, especially in this country, is mostly geared toward those who do well in the verbal/linguistics and logical/ mathematical part of the spectrum. So now the centre is working on finding out what each kid's strengths are, and then building a curriculum with volunteers from within and outside educational so that the program is adapted to the kids.

After five years volunteering at the program, I'm realising that we're just at the beginning of the journey. I'm excited that a roadmap is being drawn to suit individual kids - and that individual volunteers will be able to contribute based on their strengths as well.

I'm hopeful that this program be impactful - and that impact will go beyond those who do well in the traditionally academic areas of reading, writing and 'rithmetic.

We're in the 21st century after all.