The New Story Telling Team

A few months ago, me and the two of my friends, Kandi, and Monja, started a simple program at MI Al-Hidayah, an elementary school at Dago Pojok, Bandung. Our program is Story Telling. We go to MI Al-Hidayah once a week to tell different kind of stories to the first and second graders for about half an hour at the morning. Why did we want to create this story telling programe?

First, we got a link to the school, by a friend and the school asked us to help them create activities for the students there.

Second, we would like to share stories with the first and second graders. We hope, by sharing stories, all of the first and second graders could listen to various stories, such as fables, legends, adventures, and daily stories, etc. We hope we could help the students have new experiences, knowledge, and imaginations.

Thirdly, we also hope by telling stories, we can communicate with the students there, hoping our stories could touch their heart. We also hope that our stories will help stimulate the students so afterwards they can express their feelings, hopes, dreams, imagination too.

Fourthly, from our experiences, we found that a lot of elementary students in Indonesia have difficulties in understanding what they read. There are problems when the students can read word-by-word, but they have difficulties in understanding what they read.

Finaly, we would like to have fun and share the fun with the students.

I’m 23 years old, Kandi is 25, and Monja is 22. We all enjoy spending time with children and join activities that relate to education. All of us has participated in activities related to education for about 3 – 5 years. We all hope that we can have more people to join our activities such as this one (Story Telling). Hopefully, we can find younger participants in these kinds of activities.

So, we started to make flyers to find new volunteers to join the Story telling Program. We stuck them at boards at campus and public centers.

Luckily, a day after we putted the flyers on, a girl, who was four years younger than me, named Dhea said that she was interested to join. After meeting Dhea, we asked her if she could try telling stories at class the next week. Happily, Dhea could. It was such a great news for us.

At “the day”, Dhea came and had her first try on story telling there. The students loved her. At her first day, a little girl from the first grade told her, “Come here again next week and tell us about ghosts!” (Some children likes ghosts stories, I don’t know why) . She always came to the school for the next three week, I found out that she was loyal and happy to participate in the activity.

Dhea also can play rebana ( a kind of percussion). She told the headmaster of the school that she would like to teach the students to play rebana once a week. The headmaster pleased her. So she also started to teach the 4^th and 5^th graders rebana. I think that is nice. By teaching children music, such as rebana, can help the children learn much things, such as concentration, team work, an much more.

After the third week after Dhea joined, there were four more people who wanted to join. They found out about the program from the flyers. All of them are university students. So, there was a new ‘story telling team’. They came to join us story telling the other week. After one of us telling a story, the class was divided into small groups, and each volunteer hold a group, and interacted with the students by reading stories, making drawings together or even chatting with the students. We found out that all of them have been dealing with children before. At the day they joined the class, we found out that they were good with children. All of them became quite close with the students only by a few seconds.

We planned to meet again another day to discuss our next step and to discuss about the next session. I was happy, I hoped that the newcomers of the team, could help give fresh ideas to make our program better. I hope that they enjoy and will keep participating in this program.

Today was the meeting. Everyone (volunteer0 came, from me, Monja, and the other new ones. One didn’t came because he had an important thing to do. Kandi came a little late, and there were two more who would like to join. We talked about how we felt after meeting the students, ideas, stories we know, etc. We also discussed about our next session as planed. We also had an idea to make a journal (like a diary we share) to share our feelings thoughts, ideas and experiences, about us the students, and the program itself. Ayu, one of the new volunteers who was also an art student, wanted to make a scrap book by herself for the journal. Hopefuly, our program could be better bext time, full of creativness, and also all of the volunteers, eventhough just started to know eachother, could feel close to one another. Lets see!