2021 February 🌷

Hey everyone, it is already March of 2021! I hope you all enjoyed the Chinese New Year holiday. Due to school breaks, SSI could not stay active in December and January, but let me share what SSI was up to this February.

First of all, we started focusing more on creating bonds and building a comfortable and welcoming atmosphere for the kids. One way we aimed to achieve this was through having short but fun and active games for our students in the beginning of our lessons. Some bonding activities we did this month include musical chairs and a name game involving stuffed animals. Now, students laugh more and are more engaged during the actual lessons.

Also, we have a more structured and systematic teaching styles and schedule now. We have the first half of the lesson allocated for music theory. During this time, we have a few teachers teaching all the students together on a whiteboard. Then, we have one on one lessons for playing instruments, which turned out to be pretty effective.

Unlike last year, we started assigning homework on music theory every week. We also started focusing on motivating students. For example, we gave them stickers every time they completed their assignments so that they can fill in their sticker chart. We also gave candies when they were following instructions well and gave red packets to them on CNY. Lastly, we performed the music they were going to learn eventually (Petite Tango) for them to let them know how the music sounds like. This has made them want to practice more and helped improve their performing skills.

Now, let me talk about our current progress for our marketing team. We finalized our website and made several posts on Instagram. We also started working on fundraising, getting instrument donations, and raising awareness of our club. The school communication team also reached out to us as the first subject for presenting “students who impact our community.” For this, we created a video introducing our club and our vision, which will be posted soon.

Additionally, we received an award from the aftercare center for contributing to a greater society, which we are very grateful for. However, there are still some difficulties we are facing. First, the bad qualities of the students’ instruments and their big sizes really made the students' learning progress hard. Also, we realized that our teaching styles were quite passive and also unintentionally created serious or boring moods.

SSI is always working hard to solve these issues and teach students to the best of its ability, so please follow our SSI instagram (@sis_stringsinitiative) and stay updated on our club!