After getting more familiar with the disabled community, our service decided to design some in campus activities that works as a mini purple parade where students get to experience the life of people with disabilities.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11mShnKEdaVoVbOtIZn_A35nxRw9tS8T8wnHkjvI0VxY/edit
This is the planning document for our initial plannings.
We also got to experience the culture of this community as we learned some of the sign language in service.
Sometimes due to various reasons our service partner cannot come to our school. During these times, we try to focus on how we could raise awareness of the disabled community. We did many research on the disabled community in Singapore. Through our research, we got more familiar with the disabled community in Singapore and got to know some of the campaigns of it as well. Here are the links to some presentations and research we did on the Purple Parade, which is a festival for the disabled community and the Campaign see the true me.
See the true me Campaign Presentation
‘See the True Me’ is a public education campaign that encourages the public to see persons with disabilities for who they are instead of the disability they have. Organised by the National Council of Social Service, and made by the Tote Board-Enabling Lives Initiative. Learning about this campaign really helped us to understand more about what Singapore is doing to help the social stigma of people with disabilities and it helped to enlighten us on ways to approach the kids from the lighthouse school.Both of the campaigns aims to embrace people with disabilities by encouraging them with what they are capable of, and reinforcing the idea that although they might be having trouble in some ways but they are strong and independent individuals that do not need help in unnecessary ways. Sometimes trying to help them without asking might be against their wills and can be very disrespectful. Something that truly fascinated my is that during the purple parade, there will be purple lights lit up in marina bay and gardens by the bay, and the size of this campaign is very huge. However, if we did not research on this, we might not even realise. This made me think about this global issue more as sometimes it is our responsibility to promote the campaigns and raise the awareness more as we are now equipped with related knowledge and should be spreading this knowledge to other people.
During lighthouse last term, we not only visited the lighthouse campus, but also conducted activities with the disabled kids and learned some sign language lessons.
This is the first session we planned with the lighthouse kids. They came to our school and we conducted the activities in the conference room. We divided into several stations that hold different activities, so the students can have a wide range of choices and some rotations. Me and my group did drawing activities with the kids. Some of the deaf kids are really creative, I remember one girl wrote a note to her teacher and it was really sweet. There are other stations such as playing musical instruments and playing with balls, they all enjoyed it very much. We ended the session with an upgraded duck duck goose game, which the “goose” is a gentle touch on the shoulder.
We planned our own activities, and each group would have to plan a session.
This is our planning for the session. During the planning process, we would have to consider the disabilities of the children in order to give them the best experience, we also need to consider the safety issues so that they do not get injured during the activities. This reflect on learning outcome 3. The reflections we got from the kids are that they like playing duck duck goose, so we thought that it will be nice if we can have more physical activities. There will be art and craft as well, since some of the deaf kids are really talented in drawing. Planning and conducting activities really requires teamwork, all of us learnt that working collaboratively is important. Although one group is planning for one session, other people still need to be assigned a role. This could refer to learning outcome 5.
During this activity, we also developed skills like learning sign language. It was hard for us at first since communication with the kids are a big problem, but we are slowly learning sign language so that we could communicate with them in simple phrases such as “thank you” “hello” and “good morning” etc. This reflect on learning outcome 1 as we all experienced some growth by interacting with the disabled kids.
I joined the service lighthouse motor skill development because I want to raise awareness on the disabled community and help them to achieve the best that I could. I sometimes get annoyed at my cousins, and I really won’t say that I love kids, but I like helping kids. The kids are really adorable and friendly, I hope that by the end of the service, I can have more understanding about this community, including how to use sign language and the difficulties for deal-blind people. I also hope that the kids that are coming to our school can have fun and have some sort of development in their motor skills or interpersonal skills. I believe that my strengths that can help me to achieve my goal are I have loads of ideas, I am always empathic and willing to help. However, due to the fact that I have never communicated with hearing lose or visually impaired kids, it can be bit of a challenge to communicate with them. I also hope that by the end of this service I can improve my patience and learn how to interact with different people and how to face difficult situations.