SEGi School of Education and Languages always works closely with the industry to provide our students with the latest trends, practical knowledge from the industry. During the MCO period presents itself as a unique opportunity for students to learn how the industry is coping with the virus. The school have invited Mr.Lim Ban Seng who have years of experience of conducting storytelling to children . Therefore, with his experiences we have arranged him to share on how he have conducted online storytelling during the pandemic to our ECCE students and ECCE practitioners. During this period of lockdown, engagement with children are crucial as they can’t attend to lesson at nursery or kindergarten. The webinars are held through online platform using Zoom on the 9th May 2020. Over 70 over participants from SEGi students to ECCE practitioners have attended on his talks during online session conducted that day.
Our guest speakers Mr. Lim earned a bachelor’s degree in Electric and Electronics Engineering from University Putra Malaysia in 2006. To pursue his passion in early childhood education, he obtained a Diploma in Early Childhood in 2018. He has more than ten years of teaching experience in early childhood education. Mr. Lim is the founder of Tadika Aspirasi Murni. Besides, he is also the founder of Reading for Kids. In this capacity, he had visited public hospitals throughout Peninsular Malaysia and Kuching, Sarawak with volunteers to cheers up admitted children by storytelling. This webinar explores the ideas that involves the participation between parents and family members with the children as well. At times, we can see the role of the teachers as a facilitator for the parents and their children. During this period of time, we can see parents mostly are staying at home and indirectly they have been involving with their own children’s lesson.
The highlights of the webinars focus on the importance of Why storytelling enables the learning of young children as this are the most communicative and universal way of imparting knowledge or learning through a fun and creative ways which children will enjoy. Mr.Lim further share on the software used as such as trying various platform like Zoom, Webex and SKYPE with trial and errors. Furthermore, with the security issues on video conferencing platform he has shown few steps on ensuring the access is secured such as lock in once the participants have enter and only access with the given passwords from the storyteller. He further explained on the Flow of the Storytelling for interaction between the parents and teachers with children based on their set timeline. The storyteller should be reading out loud and try to animate with some action or movement when reading out the stories. Mr.Lim advise that the story telling can be pre-recorded for children to view at any time and suggested to use picture books that can be found in Youtube.
He further shares to the participants that music movement should also be incorporated with the storytelling whenever possible to make the activities more interesting and part of making the students to focus on the activities. Most important he reminds the participants that to ensure that during their story telling with the children is best to involved their parents and family members to play and go along with the stories to create bonding. Such as some parts of the stories mentioned on hugging and tickling which their parents can actually do the same action with their children. He further elaborate techniques on story telling can be break further into other forms such as role play and creating a simple prop for the story telling either using DIY items or can be purchased at affordable price. Children are encouraged to play along for the stories that they will be involved in and they can do simple activities by doing arts and craft.
The innovative and creative way to deliver a lesson that incorporates storytelling as part of learning beside using the aspect on music and movement or arts and craft in the children learning. The flexibility of learning is not confine by physical lesson but by exploring on the context of virtual learning as a bridge to children’s learning and their daily activities. The participants have a short Question and Answer towards the end of the webinars. The speakers ended the session with a sing along and dance by the famous song “Baby Shark” by Pink Fong. SEGi College Penang and the rest of SEGi campuses have been collaborating with ECCE partners across Malaysia to bring out the best topics, forums and insights in the field of ECCE in Malaysia for our students and the public.
