First Couple Weeks of Ping-Pong

The last couple weeks I have started to participate in the Ping-Pong after school activity, on Wednesday. This is something I have never done before (undertaking new challenges), so I thought it would be a great area to try out, especially since many of my peers play Ping-Pong (developing new skills).
When I first started, Ping-Pong was really difficult, which was unexpected since it seemed like a ‘relaxed’ sport. This really proved me the English saying: “Never judge a book by its cover,” which I really took to heart.
However through the sessions, I have quite a lot about Ping-Pong and its techniques and skills. I learned the rules of Ping-Pong quite quickly and easily, which was a good start. I also learnt more about, from my peers (collaborating with others) how to hold the Ping-Pong racket, how to serve, and how to direct and handle the ball. Soon I was able to play matches better, and win some as well, in both singles and doubles games.

Starting the serve and game

One thing that was really difficult about Ping-Pong, was strength and control of one’s strength. Since the Ping-Pong ball is relatively light, it travels really quickly, quite randomly, and further than one expects, so this took me by surprise, since in most other sports I play strength is quite necessary, and thus I lost quite a number of points. Although, through the sessions I have improved on this skills of control, it is still something I need to improve on further (increased awareness of areas for growth and improvement). 

Me in 'action.'

The New Beginning of Service

Recently, unfortunately, I have discontinued TFC due to some ethical issues there were with our topic (considering the ethical implications of our actions), thus it was difficult to involve any 'real service.' Thus I have joined a new service called "Mother Tongue Literacy," where our objective is to spread language and culture across of our community, since we do learn in English it is difficult for students to incorporate their languages into their day-to-day life and forget their languages. This problem is that something that only takes place in our community, but in a global scale, thus we hope to better the problem at least locally (engaged in issues of global importance).

We hope to start with the primary students, as we believe there are the most affected and still the easiest to help (since languages are shaped and developed when younger), thus we have started to plan our activities that we hope to carry out with them in the future. 

Firstly, we set ourselves goals as a group that we hope to achieve in the future of our service, and we had all wanted to:

1. Give back to our community 

2. Make community more culturally aware through language and various activities 

3. Spread language throughout our community. Which is, hopefully, what will be happening throughout the course of this service.

Secondly, we created a shared document through Google Docs for the group from the primary teachers' request, where each language group had to fill out a table regarding: 

1. Who we were (what language group)?

2. Whom we wished to work with in the primary school?

3. How will we spread language, and what will we do with our audience (the primary kids)?

4. At what times we could work together?

Kevin and I (the Sinhala Language Group) had filled it out saying we wanted to work with primary kids who were native to Sinhala in grades 1-4 (since this way we could further develop their Sinhala skills through various games and activities that weren't too difficult for the students), and with non-native speakers in grades 3-5 (we aimed for higher non-native audiences since we thought it would be difficult to teach younger students from the very beginning). We wanted to achieve this through various games and activities such as UNO, board games, or sports, etc., or through food (since this is an activity that everyone would enjoy and learn the basics as well). For the non-native audiences we wanted to introduce basic material such as: alphabet, colours, animals, etc. through various fun activities (planning activities); this way we hoped we could work collaboratively with the primary students. (A picture of the Google doc is given below with our answers as well). 

After the teachers replied to our proposal and we agreed on times and such, the teachers had replied back saying that we could start right after the break. I have worked with children before in the past, but nothing in such context as this, therefore it is a relatively new experience for me, where I can undertake new challenges and improve and grow in terms as a person and leader, which is something that I look forward to within our service!

A Screenshot of the beginning of the Google Doc Page

Top: Our part (Sinhala Group) of the Planning Doc