Bringing Joy of Learning to the Underprivileged

Discover the Joy of Learning (DJOL) project, a successful community engagement project conducted at Rumah Charis – Home for Children, run by a team of dedicated students from various programmes in IMU, has now reached its fourth installment. This project was a product of inspiration from the original project conducted at Rumah Titian Kaseh (Discover the Joy of Reading) a few years back. DJOL 4.0 was guided and led by Dr Dinesh Kumar Chellappan, who was the project leader and was managed by Lim Xin Ying and Loong Jie Yee, students from IMU. The project was conducted successfully with the support and funding from IMU Cares. Students from different programmes and cohorts at the IMU volunteered and spent their Friday evenings 8 weeks consecutively, tutoring the children in Rumah Charis. DJOL 4.0 was improvised from its previous instalment to suit the request from caretakers of the home along with the needs of the children. Yet, it maintained the initial aim of the project, which was to provide support and guidance in areas of education and personal development to the children at the Home. The Discover Joy of Learning (DJOL) 4.0 is a project that involved students from IMU as volunteers to tutor the children in Rumah Charis. Each tutoring session lasted for two hours where volunteers guided the children in completing the worksheets and different activities are prepared according to its suitability for the children. The children can also ask for guidance on their schoolwork upon completion of the worksheets given. With the permission and cooperation from Rumah Charis’ coordinators, we were able to reach out to children aged between 7 to 16 years old and provided them with academic guidance. DJOL 4.0 was focused on guiding the children in subjects such as Mathematics and History as the caretakers noticed that the children are weak in those subjects. It is a pre-requisite that students taking the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) to pass the History and failure to do so will result in them not obtaining their SPM certificate. Hence, the main purpose was to help the children to familiarise themselves with the examination format and be well-prepared to face their upcoming school examinations especially the Pentaksiran Tingkatan Tiga (PT3) examination. Children in the primary level (Year 1 to Year 6) were tutored in Mathematics while those in the secondary level (Form 1 to Form 5) received guidance for History. The first visit for DJOL 4.0 started on 7 September 2018 and subsequent visits were held on every Friday throughout September and October 2018 with 8 visits in total. Learning materials according to the school syllabuses was prepared by the committee before each visit to the home. A one-to-one teaching approach was implemented as we believe that we should be sensitive to every child’s needs. This is done by giving each child full attention and opportunities for providing feedback regarding the teaching methods. Adjustments were also made for some children who were unable to understand the subjects they were taught by giving them easier worksheets. To increase the children’s interest in learning, we incorporated different teaching approaches apart from traditional classroom teaching. In consideration with the children’s short attention span in studying, we incorporated short videos and comic books on the focused subject during the tutoring sessions. Interactive activities such as station games, personality test, human snakes and ladders as well as a mini sports day were also carried out in two out of the eight visits. Through these activities, not only were relationships between the children and volunteers strengthened but it also improves the children’s engagement in learning activities. The Discover Joy of Learning (DJOL) 4.0 project committees would like to express our gratitude to all the enthusiastic and dedicated volunteers who willingly spent their time tutoring the children at Rumah Charis. Also, the project would not succeed without the support from all the volunteers, committee members, our supervisor – Dr Dinesh Kumar Chellappan and funding from the IMU Cares.

About Rumah Charis
Rumah Charis is located at Taman Yarl, Kuala Lumpur and is a centre that provides spiritual direction, education as well as counselling for the children in the home who are orphans or unprivileged and neglected children of single parents.