* merely human *

Well it was not really an event, it was just a day with me and a bunch of kids.

In October, I was emailed by someone from one of UPM's faculty : Faculty of Design & Architecture for a "whole day - school kids program" to teach doodling. I'm always up for new things, even though I never really had any experience teaching kids - so I just said yes. I was nervous, but the experience matters, or how else will I learn to do it?

The week of the event day, I prepared the simplest doodle module that I could think of to teach younger audience. I managed to prepare an eight-page basic doodle materials, and printed it out at Serdang. It was just the easiest thing - *at least that was what I thought lah.

The doodle class started around 930 am after all the kids arrived and registered for the class. There were around 30 students ranging from the youngest : 6 years old to the oldest : 13 years old. They received a sketch book and morning meals from the organizer, while I brought all the printed material, colourful markers and magic colour.

The basic : Dots & Lines

All the little things

I gave out some name label stickers for all the kids to put on their clothes, so it's easy for me to learn their names if I need to. I passed the doodle module around and gave basic introduction before letting them doodle it out according to the module.

The name labels on clothes & doodle book

Determined one : she wanted to finish all the patterns, she kept coming for this page.

In the class, we tried learning the basic doodling from my module, doodle your face and your friend's face, doodle a pattern that can be used as a frame, doodle pattern types on a label sticker so they can stick it in their doodle book, and doodle on an empty file holder that they can bring back. All doodle and colouring for the whole 5-6 hours.

Here I found an interesting findings from the class :

The age gap was big, meaning their learning process was quite different : 6-8 years old can be grouped together, and 9-13 can be in a different group. Younger kids take more time and attention than bigger kids, they like to show me their updates and needed approval for next steps. Bigger kids do as they like, mostly faster and without any orders. There are pro and cons of both approach : if all the kids sit together, they won't mix around with one another and the older kids won't be having a chance of helping the younger kids - this is what I thought, so I let them sit where ever they wanted. But, next time I will try the other option of letting the younger kids sit together so it will be easy for me to teach some of them with more attention, and let the bigger ones explore more things to do in their own group with less supervision.
Each kid was unique and different. Some don't want me to see, some need all the attention, some got distracted every few minutes, some don't want to cooperate, some are so easy.
30 kids in a class is too big especially if there are younger students. Preferable around 15-20 students per class so I can sit with them at their desk to show each process step by step, instead of teaching at the white board.
Looooong hours with 2 mini recess is still too long. I need to shorten the class's duration next time. Kids are so easy to get distracted and bored.
You've heard about "not letting kids eat sugary stuffs, to avoid them getting hyper & super active" ? Well, it was reaaaaaaal. After morning break, they turned into a bunch of hyper-active uncontrollable kids, from such a nice silent little angels in the early morning. I had to shout and wave around to get their attention.

Easy-peasy, right?

Doodle anything you want on your file holder

The oldest boy : One of the easiest, and he is already a doodler *bonus point !

The class looked something like the image below.

They were separated into 3 long desks, so hard to give full attention to all the groups as they sit so far apart. Now I understand how teachers in class feel about teaching younger audience in a big class :

It's so hard to not have any favorites because some of the kids are super darlings and cute ♥, while some are divas and a bit of a drama-queens/kings, I'm not sure how to tolerate seeing I don't have kids of my own yet - I shouldn't complain. But every time I got a 'tough' moment, I stared at AF with my arched eye-brows.

Cute ones !

*

Event's poster :

Anyhow, this was a very useful and great experience.

For any possible doodle/illustration class next time, do contact me : azreen_31@hotmail.com

Later after the class, Af booked for a movie : Moana at IOI city mall, but we both dozed off all through the movie - especially me! The song keep repeating afterwards, but I can hardly remember the story clearly. I guess I was really exhausted spending the whole days with a bunch of energetic kids =.=

I grew up several years in quarters Mardi inside of UPM, Serdang. I remember the place as being almost heavily clouded with nature and it was also located in the outskirt of town. Our house was reachable after a short ride along durian farms - it was even called as Jalan Durian.

When I was small the road to my house was quite scary, houses were scattered apart from one another, there were some houses located deep in the what seemed to me like a forest. But I loved the place. I remember several earliest childhood memories while growing up in there. Aja and I, mischievous little girls. We collected biji saga to play congkak, picked up bunga raya & various leaves for masak-masak, rode from 4-wheels bicycle to 3-wheels to finally 2-wheels ride, I played with berudu in the lopak in front of the house, we danced in the rain, played at my neighbors' house until maghrib. Those little childhood memories.

Our playground was so big, we can run and play so far away.

Kids should grow up in places like this.

Not in their room, with tablets on their laps.

Last weekend I visited UPM, to pick up my running shirt and also for the Milo Breakfast Run. Here are some picture taken on my little exploration :

I used to call UPM : my Oxford, because of the overdosed beautiful old trees all around the campus.