Jul 30, 2015

Jump Your Feet Away

Being a volunteer you have to work in different areas and sometimes you see interesting things. Today I am going to tell you about one of these interesting things.

One of the Geração Tecla actions is going to the schools and spending the break with kids called Animação de Recreios . We have three different schools that we visit every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – once per week every school. This activity is something different from all the office work, that sometimes makes you more tired, than a half an hour spend with kids, so it is good, that we have an opportunity to try to find ourselves in different fields.

In all the schools the best game for all the kids is jumping the rope. It reminds me a video of DJ Fresh – Gold Dust. But of course kids are not such professionals yet!

The strangest part is that we are going to three different schools, but that are kind of close to each other, and half of the kids from all the schools live in the same neighborhood and come to the activities after school, but still they jump the rope in different ways.

The kids from Tuesday’s school have a special song when they are jumping a rope and they sing it while jumping and they even have the special way of dealing with the rope.

The kids from Wednesday’s school really enjoy jumping in pairs; or if you allow them, they will try to fit as many as possible to jump. Then, when someone doesn’t manage to jump on time they have to go back to the end of the line while others continues to jump till the last person is left, who is the Master of the rope.

Thursday school’s kids have their own different traditions of jumping the rope. They all line up and then one kid runs in jumps once and runs out and they go like this till the first kid is in the front. The first kid then jumps twice and on and on, till the break is over.

The part I love the most about going to schools is that the kids try to count in English. Ok, firstly we were counting in Portuguese, so now you can wake me up in the middle of the night and I will count you in Portuguese as fast as I can without even thinking till 30! But now, as I already mentioned, the kids are trying more and more to count in English and show us, how much they know.

Once we even   made a special rope like a net that they need to climb through without touching the rope. Of course they were jumping, flying and crawling on the ground like preparing for war. We were even laughing that we are making the little soldiers. But they really are like that especially when they start every 5 minutes to say, that it is too easy and we have to find a way to make the net more difficult to climb through.

Sometimes, it is so nice to feel like a kid and play with them; sometimes we also try to jump the rope or climb the net or play other games. Once we tried to do a relay and they loved it!



Probably the best part of this activity is forgetting everything. You are a kid again and you don’t have any more work to do, just for that half an hour you can crawl on the ground and pretend that you are 5 again and don’t worry about anything!
Gi

No comments:

Post a Comment