Volunteers at Guang Ai School
Guang Ai Orphan School Teaching Project
By Mingrun Cui
This Summer I volunteered at the Guang Ai Orphan School, managed by the China Foundation of Culture and Arts for Children, to teach English with the Mac Series that my mother and I developed. I volunteered for 6 weeks, from July 6th to August 14th, 2015, and taught the kids phonics as the basis to reading and writing. Both classes, one first grade the other second grade, were being exposed to English for the first time. Although I was teaching them English, by the end of the session they had taught me as much as I had taught them.
The school was an orphan school operating under quite meager conditions. The children, without a home to return to in the summer, stayed at school, which gave me a chance to teach them English. I commuted 3 hours a day to the school, which was remotely far from the city, in the suburb areas of Beijing. The days were hot and humid, close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit; the classrooms were bare, with no air conditioning and half of the 4 fans working. However, this did not deter the students from learning English. They caught onto my every word, and eagerly jotted down notes. The school suffered from lack of hardware, without which I could not play the Mac series. My family donated a TV, and a DVD player to the school to solve said problem.
Knowing that I had a short frame of time (6 weeks), I jumped right onto the task. I started by teaching the students every letter of the alphabet. However, I did not teach the names of the letters; rather, I taught the basic sounds of every letter. This circumvented any confusion that could have happened if I also taught the name of the letters to them. I was rigorous in my efforts and repeated every sound until the whole class got it right. I had each student repeat every single letter sound until I deemed his or hers pronunciation correct. If I thought an individual’s pronunciation was faulty, I would work with him until it was perfect. It was a lot of hard work, but it was a worthy effort. Luckily, I didn’t have to do all of the work orally. The DVD of Mac Phonics Sounds helped greatly in teaching. I used the DVD extensively during my teaching period, and it saved me loads of work. The students also worked tirelessly. Although they were only first and second grade students, their urge for learning was unmatched by any group of people I know. During the teaching, I developed various methods. One of these methods was the letter name game. One student would have ownership over a letter if he or she pronounced it well. Any student that had problems regarding this letter would go to that student for help. This built a sense of ownership and pride, and also an urge of performing well to gain such an ownership.
During the teaching of the sounds of the letters, I found out that the children were particularly having trouble pronouncing the vowel sounds. Since all the vowel sounds are very similar to the children, they kept mixing them up. I overcame this difficulty by drilling lots of vowel pronunciation, and by showing the first of the four series of Mac Phonics Stories, which emphasized one vowel sound in each story. After this specialized study, the students grasped the vowel sounds much better and would not mix them up in drills. Because the vowel sounds were presented to them in the form of a story, they were entertained by the video and did not get bored like children normally do when they study the sounds repetitively. This was highly satisfying because I personally wrote Mac Phonics Stories with my mother, and recorded them when I was little. To see other students benefit from my recordings made me feel amazing.
After all the students had mastered the pronunciations of the letters through a lot of videos and drilling, we started to play the spelling game, the software of Mac Easy Spellings. This program pronounced a word, and then said each letter sound separately. The student then selected every letter of the word from the software keyboard according to what they heard. This was something totally new to them. For the first time, they experienced joining English letters together to form the sounds of words. By this time, learning had become much easier because the students were already familiar with the sounds and could effectively learn and drill by themselves. When asked to drill something, they would drill it with great care. They loved the drill so much that they lined up at break-time to do it. I was surprised by how fast they grasped the knowledge that was taught to them.
After the students were familiar with splitting English words and choosing the correct letter for the sound of the word, we started to pronounce words by blending individual sounds together. The wondrous expressions on their faces as they heard themselves say English for the first time made everything I had done to teach them worthwhile.
After 4 weeks of relentless drilling, I decided that it was the appropriate time to have them start reading beginner books. I distributed beginner’s books, Bob Books and Primary Phonics, throughout the class. I assigned one person per book or two people per book depending on their reading levels and the difficulty of the book. At first I didn’t think that they would make great progress on the books. After all, it was their first time trying to read books in English. To my surprise however, most of the students had no trouble at all reading the material. The class started to read in no time, something that satisfied me immensely. To see students that did not know a trace of English mere weeks ago start to read with confidence was fascinating.
At the end of my teaching session, I was awarded “Outstanding Volunteer” by the China Foundation of Culture and Arts for Children.
I had an emotionally moving experience with the students. When it was time to leave, everyone was very unwilling. The students made me little cards to wish me well. They also embraced me as I walked towards the gate of the school. These are all great memories that I will never forget.
The students not only learned from me; I also learned a great deal from them. I learned that although you can suffer a great deal from fate, it does not mean that you should give up. You can live your life bravely and fully, without being haunted by the shadows of your past. To be brave is not just to face the grave circumstances in which one can be put into, but also to face everyday life with a positive attitude after bereavements. The attitude and the eagerness of the students will always stay with me, and I am immensely proud with the progress I made. It was truly an unforgettable experience.
