I'm looking back to all those times during elementary school when I asked myself in frustration "When am I ever going to need to use this?", usually during math class. Now I have my answer. The Wilfred Jury Public school homework club is where the other service learners and I finally get to use skills like long division and French spelling that we so begrudgingly learned many years ago.
The Homework Club is highly organised, which makes it much easier for us to do our share of contributing to the school on a weekly basis. All the volunteers wear name tags (that we decorated ourselves, of course), there's snack time and also a ballot system that serves as an incentive for the kids to stay focused. We help out on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursday afternoons.
Through reflection, it's become clear that it has been an extremely rewarding experience for us all. We've worked on communication techniques with children and how to motivate them to do more school work even after an entire day of sitting in class. Sometimes it's difficult too keep the kids focused, and unsurprisingly so. They've finished six hours of class which only includes 30 minutes of PE, I believe that's akin to seven consecutive UWO 50-min lectures with a quick stretch at the gym, which continues to shock me if I look at it that way. But the other service learners and I have shared our ideas on how to keep the kids focused and our techniques have been working quite well so far.
The kids have said that they are always very glad to have finished their work by the time they get home and have the rest of the evening to do whatever they please (apparently sleepovers still as fun as I remember them to be). When they've gotten tests and assignments back where they've done well, they've seen how a little extra work after school can get them the grades they like to see.
We've also reflected on the value of such a program where tutoring is provided free-of-charge by university students. Though it's still been quite a few years since I've been briefed on the fundamentals of science taught in elementary school, as a science student, I'm sure it's still a little less headache-inducing than for one of the kids' parents to remember which Newton's law is which after not having been in school for a long time.
Volunteering at Wilfred Jury has been a wonderful experience for me, as the student coordinator, too. Until now, I've been working exclusively on the planning/administrative side of things and have always gotten a little jealous when the facilitators spoke excitedly of their experiences at our weekly meetings. It's great to get a chance to do a bit of what got me interested in the CSLN in the first place, to serve and learn.
- Vivian M. Leung
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