Volunteer

2014 - Present

What I did:

I am a volunteer teacher in my church’s Sunday school. As my church is small, only one teacher is assigned to the few children that we teach every week. With a main topic given to me to teach, I have to research and come up with exciting ways to engage children during the lesson. A child with special needs will also be present during our lessons. Thus, I will have to keep a lookout for him while teaching.

Challenges I faced and how I overcame them:

1. One challenge I faced when I started teaching by myself was the insecurity that I would not be able to convey the lesson aims and objectives well to the children. Thus, I would always make sure that I prepare my lessons beforehand and list out possible questions that children can answer so that I can understand how much they have understood. If the child is young, I would get the child to draw out what they have learned.

2. Another challenge that I faced was handling the child with special needs. Being new to teaching an A-typical child, I was unsure of how to handle him. I could be teaching the other children an art and craft activity when he would suddenly come up behind me to pull my hair and kick me. Sometimes, he would run out of the room into a public premise, in which I would have to leave the whole class to bring him back to class. I felt frustrated that I was unable to control the classroom situation. Thus, I looked for my senior teachers and asked how I should handle or take care of him. The senior teachers would then occasionally drop by my classes to check if everything was okay and they shared with me tips on how to handle a child with special needs. Adding on to that, joining a Diploma course that taught how to handle and teach A-typical children, I applied what I learned and used many differentiated teaching techniques to involve the as well as behavioural redirection techniques to stop inappropriate behaviour.

Result:

Now, when I teach or facilitate an activity, I feel at ease and have started to enjoy teaching. The special needs child has also stopped kicking, pulling my hair and hardly runs out of the classroom.

What I learned:

Through this experience, I have learned how to be resourceful and have gained more experience and confidence in working with children. It has also given me an insight into what working with special needs children is like.