As Lunar New Year is coming up in February, we decided to make paper lanterns that could be used to decorate the empty walls of their common area space in the Simei community centre. We displayed an easy paper lantern video tutorial to ensure each instruction was understood by the members. Step by step we used the coloured paper, scissors, glue and/or staplers that the centre had prepared for us in advance to make the lanterns. In the end, we made enough lanterns to be divided into three chains. These chains were then hung up as a decoration in the common area space. I think the session went really well as we all worked collaboratively as we divided up jobs so that we had one service member for at least one of the Simei centre members. As we were in smaller groups if the Simei members had any complications, they were comfortably able to tell us without shame and we were able to give them the help needed (L/O. 5).
As we were asked by the Service Department to hold a reflection session with Kok Liang, one of the heads of the Simei Centre, we did not hold a session with the members of the centre. We reflected the areas of strength, weaknesses, areas where we have the opportunity to improve and the potential threats that we could face or we are facing. We did this by creating a SWOT analysis of our previous sessions. One of the things that I think stood out in the reflection session was that both groups agreed that there was often a lack of communication between our service group and Kok Liang. This was apparent as we had issues with budgeting as at the beginning of our sessions, we were told we could use up to 100 dollars per session. However, this was not what the centre had wanted therefore they changed the amount to 20 dollars per session. So for future sessions, we will be looking to cost-effective methods and materials for future sessions and plan to keep an inventory of the materials and ingredients we buy so we do not buy the same things over and over again and thus be more sustainable (L/O 2). Having said that, a strength of ours has been our punctuality and ability to finish up the activity when it is time for the session to end (L/O. 1)
For the last session in January, we stayed in school to plan for our future sessions in February and March and to update our service blog reflections. In order to do this, we split into groups of three, where one focused on cooking based activities, one focused on other forms of activities and the last group updating the blogs. Revising from the reflection session from the week earlier, we saw this was an area of weakness as we had not had many sessions as we would have liked to, therefore by planning the sessions in bulk we would be able to have more sessions where we spend time with the Simei centre members (L/O. 3). We will also take into consideration the newly set budget and request by the Service for more cooking and arts & crafts based activities.