BAKING OF BISCOTTI
The children with the teachers’ facilitation came up with ideas on how they wanted to make the community helpers’ jobs better and demonstrated in kind or actions how to appreciate these helpers. The eventual decision was to prepare goody bags and hand them out to the community helpers in the neighborhood.
Throughout the month of July, the children made batches of Biscotti with the help of their teachers, and packed and labelled the packaging.
Biscotti, an almond biscuit, was chosen so that the community helpers could enjoy the biscuits alongside their hot beverage during tea breaks.
The K1 children were delighted to see their end products: freshly baked biscotti. They smelt the wonderful aroma of the almond cookies as they waited for the biscotti to cool down. One child acclaimed loudly, “I will teach my mummy to bake the cookies.”
Every child wanted a share to pack the biscotti and to stick the labels. The children were focused in their assigned tasks.
The older group of children wrote notes of appreciation to the bus captains, hawkers, gardeners, cleaners, police, etc. for being their superheroes in carrying out their tasks diligently and safely.
To the children, the word “appreciation” means really seeing something for what it is – an awareness of how special, how lucky, how unique, how privileged, how blessed, how big, wonderful or awesome something is.
Another form of appreciation is respect toward someone or something valued. In relationships, this translates into care, concern, fair treatment and courtesy.
PHASE 3 – EXPRESSION OF APPRECIATION FOR THEIR SUPERHEROS
It was timely for the children to reciprocate their appreciation, and respect to value these professions better. The K2 Children, accompanied by their parents /parent volunteers and their teachers, were excited to make their rounds with goody bags to distribute to their community helpers whom they now see as their heroes. Ages have no barrier when come to volunteering, we had two grandparents who did a great job chaperoning some of our children. The children were chatty and were able to connect with the seniors and vice-versa.
The children distributed the goodie bags to the hawkers in the Taman Jurong Hawker Centre, the gardeners at the nearby neigbourhood community garden and the bus captains at the bus interchange.
We invited a hawker owner, Mr Ang to share about the daily operation of his stall and how he prepared his food. He also shared the different type of customers that patronised his stall and how some customers can be demanding and rude to him. The children listened attentively to his story. At the end of the Q&A time, they posted some interesting questions such as; when did Uncle Ang has his rest day? and what did he do when he is not sell his noodle?
One challenge that we had to contest with was the weather. The warm weather on the second day which was a far contrast from the day before, there was heavy down pouring of rain at 9:30 am just as the teams were about to set off. We waited for another thirty minutes hoping for the rain to stop instead it continued to rain way past two hours. With mutual consensus between the parents volunteers and principal to disabundant the mission on the first day as it near the lunch time crowds and the wet flooring. The children took the disappointment in their strip.
Along their mission journey the children were focus and on task. Each of these children were exercising their own choice in response to the situations; Who they want to give, what they want to say to their “superhero”. Each made a profound contribution to that mission as a result. We value the process and the product of authentic listening to children’s voices.
Reflections from the children:
“I get to see the place where uncles and aunties work”
“I like the bus captain for driving me to school and back home safely”
“I am happy and excited to do my part for the community helpers”
“I learnt to make Biscotti. It smells so good”
“Community helpers make our lives better.”
“Hawker center is a hot place, the hawkers have to work in the hot place.”
“I can do my part by putting the dirty plates on the return tray shelf”
“I can greet the bus captain when I meet him.”
We have set the word “appreciation” as our motto to go with this project and we are proud to attest that our children have achieved the goal and the target of this campaign.
