Making English and Math Fun! Learning With Other People is a Learning Experience

We had been planning for it for a long time. We had done presentation after presentation and it was finally going into full swing. On the 29th of March 2023, my team and I had been scheduled to do our community service for IL. The community service that we did specifically had been to teach children from kindergarten until the third or fourth grade. Originally, we hadn’t planned on where we were going to do it since we had no idea beforehand the layout or what the village looked like. We had ended up doing it in the chapel that is very accessible and near to where everyone lived.

Around two in the afternoon we had already been standing by in front of the chapel while some of us gathered their supplies from our respective homes. The sky had been kind of gloomy, so we had an idea that it would rain. And it did. Around three until 3:15, kids had started gathering in the chapel. Then, around 4:00, it had already been raining cats and dogs for thirty minutes as far as I remember. It had been really nice to hear the rain sounds while teaching the kids, though not as effective for the teaching part because the sound had blocked out most of the voices so we had to talk loudly for the kids to hear us.

The subjects that we had taught for the kids were Math and English. For math, my group and a few other groups had to teach basic math like subtraction and addition for numbers twenty and below. For example like 20-10, 4+5, et cetera. We would write the problem on a whiteboard and then we would wait for the kids to raise their hands to answer the question. And for English, we had to teach some basic words from A to G. The words had been apple, banana, cat, dog, egg, fish, girl, and boy. We had to teach the kids that were in kindergarten until the second grade so the material hadn’t been complicated at all for eighth graders to teach. We would teach them all the words, how to spell them, and their meaning in Bahasa Indonesia, and then after that we would ask them what that word meant and their meaning in Bahasa Indonesia.

As a reward, the kids would get a reward for every correct answer, which they rather liked. But after learning so long, they had gotten bored and wanted to play. The games that we had played were “ular naga” or dragon snake and “petak jongkok” or squat tag. These games made them happy and they definitely had fun playing them. Dragon snake definitely lasted for a shorter amount of time rather than squat tag. The game was very fun to watch, as only a few people played with the kids.

March 29, 2023, was the day me and my teammates did our work program. We went to the local church in Ngargomulyo village to do our work program. Some of us invited the children from the village to participate in our work program. We divided the kids into two groups because there were some with different age gaps. The first group was to be with the younger kids, and the second group was to be with the older kids. I made the choice to stick with group one's younger children. We had already planned out the activities we would complete during the work program before it began. With the younger kids, we taught them math, some English vocabulary, and played squat tag.

On our first activity, which was learning, we taught them math and English. For math, we taught them addition and subtraction. We used a white board to write some simple equations for them to solve. Some of the kids had brought in their homework so we could finish it together. To make the experience more enjoyable, we gave candies to those who correctly answered the question. The candy was a great idea; it helped them by encouraging them to answer the questions more. Some of the examples for the question included 3+7, 4+5, 9-4, 10-3, etc. Since our questions were simple, our main target audience was children between the ages of 6 and 10 years old. My task was to encourage them and give them cookies. After about 30 minutes, we switched to studying English vocabulary.

As we were teaching the kids, we made jokes along the way to keep them entertained. Words that they learned, such as cat, dog, donut, girl, boy, etc. Same with the math activity; since the English words that we had chosen are considered simple, our target audience is also kids, aged 6–10 years old. I was observing the people there when I saw that some of my teammates had been sleeping and were not helping us. I was quite pissed but decided to continue with our next program.

Petak Jongkok, also known as squat tag, was the third and final activity we did with them. A game that's similar to tag but with a twist. In squat tag, when we squat, the person that is it cannot tag us, and in order to get up from the squat position, we must be tagged by someone who is standing up. Fun fact: The idea of playing squat tag came from the kids. I could tell that they wanted to play some entertaining games because they were getting bored of learning. We had been playing it for about 10 minutes until the kids got tired. The game had acted as a reward for them.

All I could hear was screaming and laughing from the kids. They were smiling a lot more than when we did the learning activity. After the game ended, two girls fought because one of them thought the other was cheating. But in the end, me and my friend helped them calm the situation and made them friends again.