Student-led activities: A Geography lesson by Year 9s

Let's read about their lesson preparation, written by Joshua, Ngan Khanh and Sungwon (Year 9): 

For the activities, we had to plan ones that the kids would enjoy and not get bored with. We thought of different activities for the kids to do, and we chose an activity in which the kids would match animals and a habitat for the animals — the polar region, desert, and rainforest. We also had the kids draw their own animals that could survive in one of the three habitats. After everyone finished drawing, we had the kids go up in front of the class and present their own drawings to the others. The activities were fun, and the kids seemed to enjoy them while not having too many difficulties.

The biggest challenge in the process of planning this lesson was probably trying to make the lesson simple and easy to understand. Since we don’t really know the Year 1’s level of learning, we had to try and use small words, translation, and a lot of showing examples of the words. It was quite difficult to do so since there were many technical words, but it was also fun to see what solution we could come up with!

When we were organizing each other’s parts, we decided to divide ourselves into three main groups, each planning on three different habitats (rainforest, desert, and polar). I believe this was the most effective method because everyone has some tasks to research and plan, so no one person does all of the planning and researching. While Min Su and I were sorting out the presentations, the others planned the resources that we were going to use. This is because we were most familiar with technical matters and there were lots of resources to organize, which meant that we needed a lot of people to cut the materials in only 15-20 minutes (there were about 60 papers in total).

 Year 9's reflection

"Teaching the Year 1’s was a huge step out of my comfort zone. This year, I tried to become as proactive as possible and tried out many different activities. This was one of the ways I stepped out of my comfort zone. Even though we were teaching the kids, it felt like I learned some things too. I felt nervous at first, but I took a risk, and I had loads of fun. I would recommend students do something out of their comfort zone, like teach kids, because it helps grow their confidence, just like it helped me grow more confident in myself. Everyone put so much effort and time into this task, and I am so proud of the result." - By Joshua

"When I first thought about teaching Year 1 students, it seemed both an exciting opportunity and quite challenging to teach more younger students. When we were organising the resources, one of the main criteria was to engage the students, which was quite different from what I’m usually asked in other tasks in ordinary subjects. During this task, I had a chance to develop my risk-taking skills by trying different ways to think and my communication skills with my groupmates on organization and when it came to the teaching, too.

P.S. Joshua’s improvisation was great when the PPT task didn’t work for a minute. Thanks!"– By Sung Won

"When I first thought about teaching Year 1 students, I realised that it was interesting but difficult, and that was true. And I am still a student, so I know that simply explaining the theory is very boring, and it was very difficult to think of a way to make it fun. However, I tried to make Year 1 students not feel that this class is boring by preparing activities with various and fresh ideas and organising them so that they can learn naturally by preparing activities with fewer explanations. As a result, many students in Year 1 said that this activity was fun, and one student who was close to me said, "It was a very fun and interesting experience to have some brothers and sisters come to teach ours." During this task, I was able to develop collaboration skills, communication skills, and research skills." – By Min Su

"It was a great, valuable, and fun time to teach Year 1, and it makes me think a lot." – By Leo

"During the process of making the presentation, the challenge was to make something easy to understand for Year 1s but also try not to reduce the amount of information that was needed. We didn’t exactly know what kind of words were suited for the Year 1s, so we had to be careful about the words we used. When we taught Year 1s, communicating was important. We had to be patient and go out of our comfort zone to try to encourage them so that they could understand." – By Sun Woo

"This experience surely required many different qualities, from my geography skills alone to communication, inquiring, and taking risks, so it was a chance for me to really plan and do the lesson based on Year 1’s level of understanding. Teamwork was very important too, since we had to share our ideas and use each other’s best qualities. I believe we were able to successfully teach the younger students because of our effective collaboration in both planning and teaching. I would like to say one last, big thank you to my team for all their efforts that made this fantastic opportunity possible!" – By Seo Bin