Participating in the lighthouse local service has been an incredibly rewarding experience for me as I have been able to see myself grow and develop new skills as a result of working with the children.
LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth.
During my time in this local service I think one of my strengths has been planning activities and making sure everything runs smoothly. I have not only planned activities when it has been my week to be in charge, but also helped my peers if they didn’t ideas or if we needed to quickly come up with a new plan because the previously planned activity wasn’t working. I think that a personal area of growth would be my interactions with the children because although I tried my hardest to be warm and welcoming I sill felt a significant divide between myself and the children in terms of communication. I think I just need to work on how I express myself to them to make sure that regardless of the divide we are still able to understand each other.
LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
One challenge we faced was the interactions between us and the children as they had some disabilities that prevented them from being able to interact with us directly. I can say that I have learnt some very basic sign language that has helped with communication with hearing impaired children. Another challenge was having to think on my feet and come up with new activities very quickly if we realised that something wasn’t working. After some time doing the service it got easier as we developed a stock pile of activities that we knew worked and we knew we could fall back on if something wasn’t going our way. This also helped me to develop my creativity and quick thinking skills that can be used in other areas.
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.
The entirety of the activities done in this CAS experience were planned by us which allowed us to develop a lot of skills when it came to planning. It wasn’t easy as we had to find activities that both visually and hearing impaired children could find fun while also making sure that the level wasn’t too difficult. I definitely improved in my planning skills over the course of the year as I began to get a better feel for what activities would work and what activities wouldn’t from my experiences with the children.
LO4: Show commitment to, and perseverance in, CAS experiences.
This activity has run every week and even when the children didn’t come, I still showed commitment and attended the service every week unless I was absolutely unable to. It also required a level of perseverance as the children were not always easy to work with. Sometimes they were disengaged or threw tantrums or didn’t want to participate and I had to maintain my positive persona to find something that they would find interesting. It is also challenging to work with visually and hearing disabled children as although the children were amazing, it could be frustrating when I was unable to sustain a conversation with them due to a disconnect in communication methods, requiring perseverance.
LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognise the benefits of working collaboratively.
This activity definitely required a team of people as we all had different skills. I was organised and made sure everything was planned out, others excelled at working with the children, some others had artistic or physical skills that we could take advantage of. All this skills came together to form a team that was able to succeed in many different areas. In addition, collaboration was necessary to ensure that everyone was on the same page regarding what the plan was for each session and the team was needed to make sure every kid was engaged. Perhaps we could have even benefited from more people in the group as that would have helped increase the scope of our project.
LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.
Visual and hearing related disabilities are very prevalent worldwide and they are often marginalised against, especially in competitive societies such as Singapore. For us to be able to spend time with these children, even if it is just for a limited amount of time, allowed me to feel that I was improving their lives in some way.
LO7: Recognise and consider the ethics of choices and actions.
During my time in this service I had to be careful not to patronise the children or treat them like they were incapable as they truly weren’t. There is a fine line between patronisation and care or empathy and I had to be careful not to cross it. Following a conversation with one of Lighthouse’s staff, we had to be careful not to get too attached to one child in particular as when we stopped our service, the end of that relationship could be devastating to that child.
