Final Comments on the Children's Museum

My group members and I have found our work at the Central Wisconsin Children’s Museum to be very beneficial and well worth our time. At first glance, many people have the notion that the only person that is benefiting from someone’s volunteer service is the person that you are directly helping. I have found this to be invalid throughout my time working with the children at the museum. With our work, we had helped numerous young children with little animal projects that gave them a much better understanding of a certain animals eating habits, habitat, migration habits, being able to distinguish that one species from another, and many more concepts. The thing that really surprised me as the semester rolled along was the little ways that this service-learning project was really benefiting me. I knew it would be ethically good to help and volunteer, but I had no idea how much it would help my socialization and teaching skills. In the past, I have never really sat down with someone specifically to teach him or her something about something that they might not completely understand. On top of this, I have not really associated with kids ages 3-10 like I did when spending time at the Children’s Museum. I do have younger siblings and I do know how they can behave, and act, but I usually do not sit down and spend time with them teaching something to them, mostly because I do not see them a whole lot because I am gone at college. At first, I found myself in a way kind of shy when trying to talk to the children or when working on the projects with them, but each time I returned to the museum, I found myself more comfortable with them and began interacting with them more and more.

This service-learning experience did connect to the things we were learning in class in that we took the topics we learned, and broadened them out to teach them at a children’s level. When we were doing this, we often found ourselves reading children’s books we got from the library and learning many little interesting facts that we had never known before. I thought this was a great way to learn things in the topics we are going through in class, and I think it was a great way to teach us to be involved and help out within the community, because it really does help you as well as the people you are performing the service for. I think this was a very good activity that more courses should consider incorporating into their curriculum. With all things considered, I had a great time with my experience at the Children’s Museum and I think it is a very good experience to have and would recommend an experience like this at least once in someone’s life, just so they know the things you can benefit from it. Usually, after someone does it once, they find the personal benefits that can be obtained and continue to volunteer throughout the course of their life.