SHAWCO

I’ve briefly mentioned my involvement in SHAWCO, the Students' Health and Welfare Centres Organisation so I thought I’d write a little bit about what it is and what I do. SHAWCO is a large organization on campus, so large that this semester they had to turn away many students even though it is a volunteer organization. (Visit http://www.shawco.org for more information.) As a part of SHAWCO, you visit the townships in and around Cape Town once a week for about 3 hours and help out. You can become involved in tutoring, sports, arts, life skills, etc.I am a part of the arts program, which is composed of fine arts, drama, and music. Today was my second visit out to Matenburg, the township we volunteer at. We volunteer at something that is similar to a school/community center. It is a one story building divided up into classrooms, surrounded by a grass field. I go on Tuesdays from 2-5PM with about 20 other UCT students. When we arrive at Matenburg, there are always kids waiting outside, waving and giving us high fives as we step off. We are given a lesson plan for the day and broken up into groups, the children ranging from grades R-2nd, 3-5th, and 6th and 7th. Both times I have worked with the 3rd-5th graders, who I think have more energy than the other two combined. Last time we made a collage of fruits and vegetables, cut out from different colors in a magazine. (My favorite was the kid who drew a low-rider car and wrote Eugene in bubble letters below it, completely missing the point of the activity, but loving his artwork!) I think the kids thought this was a little boring, and a funny thing was that they knew many fruits and vegetables that I had never heard of before. They were asking me how to spell fruits that I didn’t even know existed. Today we were given a story to read to them, and they were supposed to illustrate their favorite scene and then create a chronological story wall with their pictures. Well, the story was about black humans and white humans and grey humans and “The Angel of Colour” and it was just—boring. And honestly, the vocabulary was far too challenging for the majority of the students. Some of them barely speak English, they have grown up only speaking Afrikaans. So, I completely changed the story as I went and made it something about a colorful fish, and then I drew a fish. And then I had to draw a fish for Maxcine, and one for Marjorie, and one for John, and one for every single kid at the table I was sitting at. I added a star next to my fish and seconds later, sure enough, I was drawing stars on 8 different papers. So then I decided to teach them how to draw a fish, and I simplified my version and gave them a lesson on how to draw a fish. And at the end of the day when the classroom put up their drawings of gray humans and black humans and white humans, my group put up identical pictures of colorful fish and stars. (Ours were the best, and we had the most fun!) I think these children are very grateful to have SHAWCO visitors. You can tell by the smiles on their faces when the buses arrive and the way they grab your hand the minute you set foot onto the field, they are very happy we are there. Every time I would get up to get a new colored pencil for the table, one of the kids would exclaim “But I thought you were staying until half past four!!” We are free to create our own lesson plans, so if anybody has any suggestions for inexpensive (preferably free) art projects to do with children grades 3-5…please let me know!