Social Action Project Reflection
At the school I was at for teaching experience the school gave me a social action project to do instead of me coming up with my own one because they already had projects planned from the beginning of the year and they could not accommodate any new ideas or project so I was given a task to work with the environmental club group which is an extra curriculum at the school on Tuesday and Thursday, and I had to plan lessons and activities that will create environmental awareness and educate the learners on the importance of taking care of the environment.
This project was effective as I was able to create awareness and educate the learners on the importance of taking care of our environment and the different ways they can do so, I was also able to educate them on the consequences of not taking care of the environment and the effects it might have on humans and animals. I believe this encouraged the learners to share this information with their peers and family to also take care of the environment and also play the part in their different environments. These two parts were effective as I also made use of visual aids to show the learners the different things I was talking about and I also used videos to educate the learners so they could also hear the importance of taking care of the environment from another source.
The action project was a success because I was able to educate the learners on environmental awareness and also do different activities with them that were taking care of the school environmental and the learners enjoyed the activities and showed enthusiasm from the litter clean up to the making of the of the bird feeders and planting plants and making a school garden next to the environmental club class, for some of the learners this was the first time doing some of these activities so I would say it was a success as I was able to make it fun because taking care of the environment does having a boring connotation to it, so the learners didn’t not expect to have so much fun while doing it which I believe will influence the learners to educate more people and get them involved. The challenges of this project would be the rules I had to follow from the school and how I had to limit my activities and could not do things that involved the community or the parents as the school did not allow it, another challenge I experienced was how I could only work with the environmental club learners and not the whole school as the school did not allow it so this was challenging as on some days only six or seven learners would come to environmental club and on some days there would be a high number of learners, this was difficult as sometimes I did not have enough learners to do planned activities and also it was difficult to create as much awareness as possible with only a few learners there.
Service learning has changed me in such a way that I have realized that so much planning goes into school projects and it is not that easy to implement them and get the involvement of the learners it has also made me more aware of the environment and that is it important to take care of it and be responsible citizens. Professionally it has taught me how to present my ideas to the staff of the school and also it has taught me teamwork and also how planning things while you still have time is very important so you communicate to parents and the members of the school should it be necessary. I have also learnt that I should always have a Plan B should my initial plan not work, especially here because in some cases I struggled with the low number of attendance from the learners in environmental club.
This project benefited the school because it taught the learners to take care of the environment and not litter and it also gave learners ideas on how they a play a role to make sure that the school environment it always well taken care of It taught the learners to recycle, re-use and reduce and lastly it created a plant garden for the school that the learners will learn how to take care of and see their plants grow.
