A tiny contribution to society

Posted on October 10, 2020

The Covid-19 pandemic has been associated with negative connotations, such as losing family members and income, fear, stress, physical distancing, working from home, etc. I reflected about the positive side during this challenging period. I found out the list is quite long. As the saying goes, “we can always make the best out of the worst that the world offers today”. Below are some thoughts about the effects of the pandemic.

• It reduces traffic and air pollution.
• It gives me more time to be at home and be with my family.
• It makes me reflect what is important and not so important in life.
• It raises my awareness to live a healthy life.
• It brings people closer in terms of helping each other and sharing knowledge.
• It forces me to be creative and adaptive.
• It improves my ability in using recent technology.
• It connects me with many educators around the world.
• It makes me aware of what is going on around my neighbourhood.

Since March this year, I have done most of my teaching activities from home. I noticed that six to seven children, with age range of 3 to 9 years old, have been playing around my house every day. This is also another positive thing during this tough time. Children have lots of time to play and go back to nature instead of spending their weekends in the malls. The children in my neighbourhood always ring my house bell and tease my four dogs. One day, I took an opportunity to talk to them and discussed their behaviour. Most of them were afraid of dogs due to different reasons, including the religious aspect. Then, I explained to them about dogs and ways to handle them. I also reminded the children to wash their hands after playing with pets. Surprisingly, they have become my regular visitors and made friends with my four dogs. They love to feed and walk my dogs every Saturday and Sunday. They even told their friends how to approach and feed the dogs. When it came to the religious reason, one child said, “Even though we have different religions,  we are one nation and we are not different in front of God”. I was surprised to hear this deep thought from such a young mind.

I recently finished joining a webinar series about “Play in the Early Years”. It was a confirmation of what I have been doing as a teacher. I was excited to apply what I have learnt and observe the inquiry process. So the following day, I prepared some sensory materials and let my regular young visitors play with them.

Immediately, questions were pouring out from them. They asked why there are bigger and smaller water beads, what is the rubber band for, who made the beads, etc. They were also very much engaged in the materials and busy playing together. I taught them a simple trick to move the rubber band from one hand to another. Two older children were paying attention and tried to do it by themselves, and they managed to do it. They were so happy and proud about their achievement and started to teach the other children until they too could do it.

Then, I was thinking about my school new vision which is “Fostering and Empowering Society in Building and Serving the Nation”. I just realised that it could be my tiny contribution to my society to develop the children not only at my school but also around my neighbourhood to be inquirers, thinkers, creative, open-minded, and caring learners.

By: Geertruida Maya

Early Years 1 Teacher

BINUS SCHOOL Simprug

gmaya@binus.edu