by Charlie Boother, Assistant Head of Year 9

This term, students from across the three schools have participated in a series of service-learning projects.

Service learning is a natural development from our historic ‘charity’ projects which requires students to take what they’re learning in academic situations and transform their ideas into action. This action connects their understanding to a need that has been identified in the community and helps them do something that really matters.

Why Service-Learning? Why not charity?

Charities like Love, Nils often need more than just money. Raising funds for an organisation still requires their teams to coordinate the use of the income and divorces our students from the practicalities of what charities truly need.

Tanglin Trust School has had a long-standing relationship with Love, Nils and it made sense for us to develop a service-learning project with them as many of our own students have directly benefited from their incredible work. Indeed, some of our year 9 students are already looking at alternative projects for next academic year to raise awareness of Love, Nils’ vital work.

Who needs what? How can we support?

After communicating with representatives from Love, Nils, it became clear that their pressing needs were more books and toys for the children on the wards. In particular, children aged 13-16 often find there are no age-appropriate gifts as younger age groups receive the most donations. This was something that resonated with our older students and our guest speakers offered support on what kinds of things the children would most hope to receive while spending long periods of time on the wards.

As a team, we developed our Amazon wish lists with the guidelines from Love, Nils and at the start of term 3, we invited all families to support our ‘Love, Nils’ service-learning projects!

We ran concurrent programmes to meet the needs of their book and toy drives. After five weeks of exciting parcels arriving, our dedicated junior and senior CCA students packed all of the gifts on Monday, with representatives from Love, Nils.

Reflection

We’re delighted to have sent off over 160 books and more than 60 toys to children receiving life-saving cancer treatment at NUH and KKH. Over half of our donations were aimed at children in the 13-16 age category and this is a fantastic achievement. We can’t wait to hear back from the NUH and KKH volunteers about how these toys and books have been received. They will undoubtedly make a difference for the child and their family.

Our Service Learning CCA team are already dreaming up their next project. We would love to hear from you if you have any ideas or would like to support our next service learning adventure.