The Individual Reactions

June 21

It is the due date of individual action. I introduced my personal proposal which is about international communication to every group member. Also, I came up with the idea like holding a basketball game to promote the communication between students in college rather than just talking. After the introduction of each group member, we decided to combine everyone’s idea together to form our project, which is going to an elementary school, talking to kids about consumerism and world hunger and doing some activities with them. Thus, I thought we may hold a game to play with kids together.

June 23

Ryan realized the information about Boys and Girls Club of Story County from his football coach, so we decided to implement our project in Boys and Girls Club. I thought that was an extremely good chance to communicate with American kids. Also, it would be a fantastic way to feel the different life style during the break compared to children’s lives in China. After that, we explored the website of Boys and Girls Club to acquaint every group member with this club as well as to search the open time and contact information. It was very helpful to have a deep realization of the place we would go to.

On the other hand, Ms Dixon suggested us to narrow down our topic because it is too broad to achieve it in short term. Therefore, when we contacted Todd Jorgensen who is the program director of the club, we asked him to choose one among three prepared topics. Also, we inquired and made sure the presentation time and the audiences.

After the contact with Todd, we thought out a better topic – healthy living in which we could include both eating healthy and being active. Thus, we confirmed “healthy living” as our project topic.

I believe that it was a successful start. We worked effectively to make sure the purpose and audiences. Meanwhile, we also took shape in action.

June 26/27

During this weekend, we firstly met in Park Library to make an outline of the presentation to kids. We did our best to make this presentation vivid and discussed the availability of different games and activities. I suggested that we should begin the presentation with some interesting questions so that we could engage the kids who are our audiences. For examples, we could show them some food pictures and ask them what their favorite food is and what food they think is the healthy food. Then, we assigned the work to each group member. My work was on nutritional fact and healthy food for kids. Therefore, I did some research on the Internet and found a fun game in which children are asked to color a nutrition pyramid so that they could realize how much nutrition they need every day. After that, we took the action shots outside the library and went to Hyvee to take photos of eating healthy. We supposed to use these photos to make some videos used during presentation.

June 30

This morning, we had a conference with Ms Dixon. During the meeting, we reported what we have done and what we are going to do. After meeting, we had a brief discussion outside the office. The point mainly focused on combining the videos and materials prepared by each one. In the afternoon, I went to Nidhi’s office to prepare the Powerpoint which would be used in presentation to kids together with her because both of us worked on the part of eating healthy. I searched a lot of cartoon characters of healthy food and put them into my Powerpoint to make it vivid and attract kids’ attentions. All the group members met in the library again in late time this day. We brought everyone’s work and put them into one Powerpoint and modified a little to make a unique style. Besides that, we did some practice and checked everything done to the presentation next day.

July 1

Today is the day that we went to the Boys and Girls Club and achieved our presentation to kids. The group assembled in front of East Hy-Vee and bought healthy food as prizes for kids around 7:50am. After arriving the Boys and Girls Club, We did some preparations and began our presentation. The entire procedure was very successful and we had a great time with the kids there. Honestly, I really like them. Although there was a little talking difficulty sometimes because of my poor oral English, I still appreciated to play with these cute kids. They let me think back my childhood when I lived without any bother.

July 5/6/7/8

After finishing the presentation in Boys and Girls Club, we transferred our main emphasis to the final paper and presentation in class. We met every night in Molecular Biology Building which is the place Nidhi works. We were still allocated with different tasks. I worked on the implemented plan of action with Yinfei. Besides finishing the paper writing, I also prepared the Powerpoint of my part. I searched some related pictures and adopted some photos taken during our activities to put them into my Powerpoint, which could make the presentation more visually and attractive.

What is more, there were also some other actions during these days. On July 6^th, we went back to the Boys and Girls Club to collect the feedbacks from kids and director of the club. Meanwhile, we played the game “jeronimo” with kids to enjoy the best time together with them. There was also an amusing thing happened that day: a boy in the club who didn’t attend our presentation last week gave me two new English names: Fred and Steve and kept calling me Steve throughout the activity. At last, all the kids began to call me Steve. Although this might be my last time going there, I will never forget the happy time with them.