Service Learning

One of the activities that my Red Cross clubs can do is service learning (or teaching one the health and safety classes that I usually teach to elementary/preschool students). As their January activity, one club has been going a few of their feeder schools to teach Scrubby Bear (hand washing).
So, as part of Scrubby Bear, there is a person who dresses up as Scrubby the Bear (who LOVES washing his hands/paws). The costume is your basic bear costume: head, gloves, feet, and the body (which has a stuffed belly, a tail, and Velcro in the back to close it) along with a Red Cross Disaster Volunteer vest. I usually have an adult (school nurse, parent volunteer, para etc) dress up as Scrubby so I don't always explain what you have to do to get Scrubby ready. For these service learning classes, I have one of the club members dress up. For my third/forth classes, I had a boy club member volunteer so he went to the bathroom to change as the rest of us went into the classroom to start the presentation. Scrubby waits in the hall until we are ready for his visit. When we were ready, a student went out into the hall to bring Scrubby into the classroom. As I was introducing Scrubby, I noticed that his tail was in the front so I broke out into laughter. Soon the other club members and the teachers noticed and all started laughing. While we laughed, the kids just looked at us like we were crazy. They had no idea why were laughing and I didn't want to tell them in case they actually believed Scrubby was real. My other Scrubby's were also awesome but had the costume on the correct way! haha :)

These classes were so fun to do with the club members. It was so neat to see them as the teachers. Some of them struggled with a few things, but mostly they were awesome! We didn't have a lot of time to prepare and they caught on very quickly. It was neat to see how they reacted to the kids answers to questions. You could tell which ones had a lot of experience working with little kids and ones who were having a new experience. Most of the club members got more comfortable and confident as the class went forward and the youth we were teaching seemed engaged and captivated. I felt so proud watching them teach the class!

I think all of the club members enjoyed teaching which was really neat! Hopefully, I will get a chance to have them teach more classes!