Service Learning Project Observation

As the sun moved out of the clouds, I anxiously waited in the car and frantically refreshed the group chat in search of a message about the arrival of the other group members. Due to this initial anxiousness, it seems that I was afraid of or uncomfortable entering into the center on my own. With less than fifteen minutes left until the project began, the group members failed to announce their arrival, which further enhanced my anxiety. Just as I began to feel alone and mentally prepare myself for the worst, one of the members approached my car. During this entire semester, my group, Team H, planned and eventually executed a service learning project in Greater Lafayette at the Hanna Community Center with diverse, elementary-aged children. From

This type of project is not a task that one or two individuals could accomplish without a detailed timeline. Instead, it requires the help of multiple individuals for separate tasks. In the beginning of our project, we struggled accomplishing the smaller assignments as one of our members failed to help us. The second lesson I learned is that things do not always go as planned. During our project, we experienced some challenges with the children and setup of the room, which made the execution of the project more difficult. Although our group was able to eventually adapt to this challenge, I initially felt frustrated as it felt that our group was not prepared for these curve balls. In other words, we failed to discuss potential challenges in depth with each other and prepare a backup plan, which would have made things go even more

More specifically, the skills that we used to plan the activity were brainstorming and giving feedback. During one of our meetings, three of our members collaborated together to come up with potential ideas for an activity. Once each of us suggested ideas, we were able to build off of each other’s ideas, which eventually led to our final activity idea. During this brainstorming process, I initially came up with the idea of having the children engage in a goal-setting activity, but received feedback from another member that this activity may be difficult for the younger children. With brainstorming and giving feedback, we were able to come up with an activity that worked for both the younger and older elementary-aged children. Along with the skills used for planning, we used the helping skills, discussion/reflection, modeling, brainstorming, and flexibility/problem-solving, for the implementation of our activity. During our project, we implemented a pre and post discussion/reflection with the children, which allowed the children to demonstrate their previous knowledge on healthy lifestyle choices and reflect on their gained knowledge or their experience overall in the activity. During these discussions, I felt overjoyed as the majority of the children participated by raising their hands to answer questions. It seems that the children were excited to engage in a