by Olesya Ilinskaya, Moscow, Russian Federation
EERco Volunteer, MACs AUTUMN Pr., EVS e+ | Alexandreia, GR
Last Job Shadowing Experience in Black Swan Dance Studio
While another volunteer was conducting activities in Pereya, I had an opportunity to realize all my desires with children in Black Swan.
“If you do not praise yourself, no one will” we say in Russia. So, honestly, I have a lot of experience of working with children different ages. I studied age psychology, game engineering, motivation and behavior in conflict situations, and practiced all these knowledge in summer camp as a camp leader. I conducted different art classes with primary school children during volunteer project in China and I worked as a school teacher of physics for half a year. I have been a tutor of math for 4 years already, so I worked with children from 6 till 17 years old. I also have a young sister.
Children are amazing. They ask you every time <<Why this>> and <<Why this>> and sometimes you do not even know the answer, or, may be, you know, but you need to create a way to explain it. They are very creative as well: they do not know a lot of things that is why their thoughts do not constrained by boundaries, on their pictures cats fly and apples are purple. They can ask you some questions you do not even thought about. Children are happy, because they face a lot of new things and emotions during each single day. We need to learn from them a lot!
I should return back to reality. As I already said I was able to conduct activities with two different groups of children in a dance school. What can I do with children around 5 years old? Of course, the most interesting for them should be playing! They already know each other, that is why we do not need to play introducing games, but we will do team-building games. It is very hard to explain rules of the game, actually. I spoke English and their teacher translated, but it could be so many misunderstanding… All together they did difficult tasks and I believe they have developed their team work. We did it and I have seen how children liked it. As a memorable end we danced a Russian horovod. It is very easy and cooperative dance. With second group it was even more intriguing. They were older then children in a previous group, but I did not have a translator! It was hard to explain the rules of games, they didn’t catch all words.
I had a great pleasure to cooperate with children, hope so do they.
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