Yanru, Azuo, Miranda, Sylvia

Mirgrant Children Programs

Reflection (Azuo):

In the lesson we were prompted to research about migrant children. My research was mainly focused on two directions. I searched about the definition of migrant children, which helped differentiate them from left behind children (migrant children usually move across a border to a different place to live and study, whereas left behind children stay behind in a town when their parents move into the city to work). A possible problem migrant children face is being unable to adapt to a new environment, which causes a sense of not “belonging” to a place and reduced happiness and emotional wellbeing. Another direction when doing research was learning about what organizations are doing to help migrant children. From my research I found out that most organizations are providing financial support to migrant children, but often neglect the more deeper, psychological needs of the children.

Investigation - Empathy vs. Sympathy

Reflection:

We identified that empathy cames from experiencing emotions at the same level.

We started to care more about putting ourselves into others' shoes as we realized the difference between "Empathy" and "Sympathy". We will try to think from the migrant children's perspectives in our conversations and understand the

PSYCHOLOGY!

I learned about Children development in Psychology CCA, suddenly finding it has deep connections to these children and how we can help them.

We say that poverty has a significant negative impact on mental health and cognitive abilities of children, shown by plenty of evidence and studies.

Many of these migrant children are exactly those that suffeer from poverty. The reason behind is that with poverty, lower living standards, parents are more dissatisfied with their lives, developing habits such as whining and complaining frequently to children, even shouting at children often, or directly neglecting the children. Children, who are so curious about the world at first and eager to learn about love, are severely suppressed and hurt by these adults, causing them to not receive the information and interpersonal skills they ought to get. These parents have neither the knowledge that playing and interacting with children is important, nor the time and energy to play with children.

Thus, when children grow older to about Grade 4-5, as we may see on the day, some may have bad communication or social skills, and have less interests in studying.

10 Questions

1. 你周末一般干什么？
   
2. 你家乡是哪里的？
3. 你最喜欢的科目是什么？为什么？
4. 你喜欢吃什么零食？
5. 你的梦想职业是什么？
6. 介绍一下你的朋友吧！
7. 你喜欢哪些动画片/游戏？
8. 你爸妈给你零花钱吗？
9. 你父母是做什么工作的？
10. 你想问我们什么问题吗？
    

Reflection:

By asking these questions, I soon discovered similarities between my buddy and me. We share similar interests such as our love for cherries, watching SpongeBob, and our favorite character from SpongeBob, Patrick!

The common interests help shorten our distance, fostering our cooperation later.

🧊 Ice Breaking Games - Intro

We investigated what ice-breaking games we could have done on the Service Learning Day. Ice breakers allow us to connect better and know the migrant children, further making it easier to cooperate with them later. We did this by playing several games ourselves. Here are our demonstration.

In class, we tested out the icebreaker game teacher showed us in class. I(Azuo) was in charge of being the instructor. The game went pretty smoothly as students were familiar with each other and understood the rules from the video shown, but an observation was that when having a short person after a tall person in the circle, it became a bit tough for the short person to participate within the game. This made our team reflect on how we should present the game to the migrant children and how we should respond to problems that may arise in the process. Our solution was to rehearse how we wanted to communicate with the children and videotaped the process, as shown to the left. In the process, we had some trouble communicating with teammates; there were instances where we were different in our understanding of the game. As a result, we discussed the parts where we had diverged ideas and completed more test runs of the games we designed.

🧊 Ice Breaking Games - Video

🧊 1️⃣ Ice Breaking Game

Game # 1

老狼，老狼，几点了？

🧊 2️⃣ Ice Breaking Game

Game #2

排队传"话"

🧊 3️⃣ Ice Breaking Games

Game # 3

喊数抱团

So I will...!

As these children may have these problems, I feel quite sorry to them as for me, I rarely have to worry about housing or eating and my parents treat me fantastically with care. When playing games with them, I will try to communicate with them to spread happiness; if they are open to share some deeper thoguhts about family issues, I could be a good listener, also further provide my fresh perspective on the issue, which may help them to build self-esteem and have more courage to talk to their parents, or see what ideas are right and what's not.

For exmaple, I'd try to talk to them as much as possible in "wolf, wolf what time is it?" game, and ask them "what's up" or start by sharing a small problem I faced these days.

By doing so, I could understand their situations better to emphasize with them more.

——Miranda

Pre-trip Reflection

I’m pretty excited to be able to talk one-on-one with a migrant child; I’m fairly sure that I would get along well with my partner. The experience would be extremely rewarding for me, as this would be a rare and valuable opportunity to communicate and interact with people who are of a different upbringing to me. I do hope that my partner will be someone who is willing to share and chat with. However, it was rather disappointing to hear that our interaction with the children may be limited to mostly icebreaker games, as the reduction in time talking with the children would hinder our development of a personal connection to the children.

——Azuo

On the Service Learning Day

Permaculture

YK Pao students holding the seedlings

Permaculture

Walking to the field

Permaculture!

Photo # 1

Teachers who helped us with farming

Photo # 2

A man picking the rice seedlings

Photo # 3

Lesson on permacultue

Looking Back: Ice Breaking Games

ylvia

iranda

Looking Back:

Time with the buddy - Yuqing

My partner for the trip was Yuqing. She was quiet and timid at first but opened up very quickly after we discovered that we both enjoyed reading the same genre of books. Being a confident and precocious conversationalist, Yuqing talked to me about her daily life, school and hobbies. When it came to the farming activity, she displayed quite a different side to her. Being alongside her peers, Yuqing frolicked, joked, and revealed a much lively side of her personality…

Altogether, the permaculture trip was an extraordinary experience. I bonded with my partner, made quite a lot of new friends, had a hands on trial of permaculture farming, and learned the basic principles of permaculture<3

—- Azuo

Azuo and her buddy Yuqing

Yuqing (Left) Azuo Zhao (Right)

Looking Back:

Time with the buddy - Tom

Miranda and her buddy Tom

Tom (Left) Miranda Yuan (Right)

My buddy was called Tom. He was very honest and quite quiet. I loved to play with him. We found that we both loved cats , running sprints and the English Language. He was studious and hard-working, planting rice and left in the last minute, listened attentively at the permaculture lecture. However, he seemed to be not very confident about learning and avoided my question of what job his parents had. He had a Shanghai Hukou, but his parents may still have low level jobs in the companies, and don't have great parenting methods, making him carry a sense of inferiority in him.

This may be the problem with migrant children - they may still feel they don't belong to the society and have no opportunity to rise to a higher social status, and their knowledge is still limited by the knowledge of their parents, whi were originally from less-developed places.

By communicating with him, I have a new friend. I also empathize with migrant children and the situation they are in more. Being migrant children, influenced every part of their lives.

My buddy is Ada. Her family is from Fujian, and she has been living in Shanghai since kindergarten. She has a younger brother in Grade 1 and an older sister in Grade 6. She loves sketching and Chinese dance (so do I when I was in elementary school).

Ada was very shy at the start. She occasionally avoids eye contact at first but is more open to talking after we get to know each other better. Ada told me that her sister will return to Fujian when her sister rises to Grade 7, and she will have to do it too. Her younger brother is sometimes annoying, but her mother never asks her to humour her brother.

Ada was a bit timid but alert when we were transplanting rice seedlings. She told me that she might get sick tomorrow since she was half-immersed in cold water for an hour. Ada is also quite shy and doesn't like to take pictures. She also dislikes things with many buttons, for example, a camera. She thought it was too sophisticated to operate.

Looking Back:

Time with the buddy - Ada

Sylvia and her buddy Ada

Ada Wei (Left) Sylvia Wang (Right)

Thank You!