On August 3rd, Eileen Zhang from the East Cobb Branch participated in the Summer Camp Program and taught for one hour.
This program was initially started due to the cancellation of summer camps caused by COVID-19. Its goal is to provide entertainment and teach different skills to children who may be bored at home or want to learn something new. The volunteer or volunteers may teach 1 on 1 or in groups no more than 5. By teaching these kids, we want to help them have fun and relieve some burden from their parents.
Activities that are offered include tennis, soccer, cooking, art, reading/writing, music theory, piano, dance, Chinese, and Rubik’s Cube.
Eileen contributed by teaching 3 kids art.
For art class, I often had two cameras, one for my face and one for the table where I demonstrated how to draw the piece. I only had three students, so it was easy to keep track of what each was doing and if they needed help. For classes, I often prepared a prompt for the piece that we were going to make. The students would follow a general example, but also had room for creative choices, like what color they wanted to use, or the shape of something.
The biggest issue with art class was not being able to see what the students are drawing. Asking students to hold up their paper worked sometimes, but if the student had already messed up, I would have to come up with a way to fix the piece or make it look better. Having a mixed age class was also a bit difficult. My youngest student often had trouble following along, as the older students often finished quicker.
Teaching the class was very fun. Seeing my students finish a piece and be proud of their work is very nice. Classes generally ran very smoothly, and students had little trouble following along. In the beginning, my camera placement for the table (where I was drawing the example) was less than ideal, and I had trouble positioning it where my students could get a full view of the paper. However, I was able to fix the problem after taking inspiration from the set-up of one of the other art teachers.
Reported by Eileen Zhang
Participants: Brian Kuang (1hour), Jeffrey Kuang (1 hour), Gary Mei (1 hour), Jack Xu (1 hour), Isable Liu (2 hours),Katherine Sha (2 hours), Eileen Zhang (1 hour), Sophia Fang (1 hour), Terrence Liu (3 hours), Scarlette Liu (1 hour)
