Multiculturalism and volunteering

The Friday 25th  march, we had gone to the Școala Gimnazială in Constanta. It was the pleasure to deliver the workshop on “Multiculturalism and volunteering” during fifty minutes with the 6th grade.

The objective is to make understand them what the volunteering is, why it’s important and necessary. Also, what is the culture, how we can understand and discover other culture and countries.

During this workshop we begin with interactives games to talk about volunteering.  Then, we do an activity about Romanian and other cultures. After, we show them a funny series about the cultural shock we can have when we travel in different country.

Pictionary game

In the first place, we’re doing a Pictionary with a word chosen in link with the multiculturalism and volunteering.

Three students coming to the board and drew a word to make guessed. The words choose randomly are children, teacher and travelling. It was a fun activity and the student have managed to find all the words, sometimes with a little bit helping.

After, we give one candy for the winners and of course, at the end of workshop we give candy for all students.

What is volunteering?

Then, we’re doing a “Rise your hand” game for give them the definition of volunteering. We ask them if they done or not something with a sentence like “picked up trash from the beach”, “adopted an animal in the street”, “donated books or clothes” or “helped a classmate with their homework”. These sentences represent what is the volunteering and show the implication and generosity.

At last, pupils could relate to many of the sentences and were able to understand, with the help of the examples given, the definition of volunteering.

Romanian culture

For the next activity, we put the students in 4 different groups. We give them paper with different topic about the Romanian culture, for example:  Food, Music and dances, fun facts, and holidays. These topics are present in the form of flowers, in the middle there is the subject, and they should place the words in the flower’s petals.

After, we share the answers together, talk about the Romanian culture and what they like in this culture. It was interesting for us because we can learn thing, we don’t know in the Romanian culture with them.

The Lost in Moldovia series

In this exercise, we show an extract to the first episode of the series “Lost in Moldovia”. This movie says the stories of American man who go in Moldovia for volunteering project. We can see, in a comical way, the cultural shock he undergoes when he arrives in the country. Indeed, there are lots of difference between American and Moldavian life. They liked a lot this series and they was disappointed when we stop it.

So, we asked them questions related to the cultural shock with the example them watched in the series:

•  Based on what you see, how do you think he is feeling?
•  How do you think you could help him feel more comfortable?

This exchange was instructive, and it show us them interest and happiness for this series.

What about the others country?

For the last activity, we talk about the culture of other countries. Thus, we use the same prince as the previous activity about Romanian culture. Instead of the different topics on Romania, we put different countries like: France, Syria, Moldavia and Italia. And we show to the student many words in mess about different country culture. The goal is the find the good words for the good country.

For example, one group have de country Italy and he should put the word related to the Italian culture: Volcano, Vespa etc. Like this, we can learn to them news cultural things about other country.

To sum up, the students was very enjoying participating. We had the very good feedback and they asked us to come back. It would be a pleasure to go back and do workshops with them.

Location: Școala Gimnazială nr. 28, Constanța, Romania
Date: Friday 25th March, 2022