Objective
Volunteer your time at this annual on-campus event that over 900 K-8 students attend. Assist an author and/or help direct people to presentations on math, reading, and science.
Reflection
On Saturday, April 15th, myself and many other education students took part in volunteering for the Family Learning Conference. My personal job included finishing setting up tables, moving objects to their correct spots, and helping my author, Meadow Griffin, get settled into her presentation room. Initially Meadow was scheduled to hold her author talk in Hoover, then she was moved to Barkley because both of those rooms had scheduling conflicts. We were finally able to secure a room for her presentation in the Campus Center. One of the issues that arose with this was people did not know where she was going to be giving her author talk because she was not in the room that was specified on the program. To fix this issue, myself and some of the other helpers placed paper signs on doors specifying where and when her author talk was taking place.
I really liked how the conference began with allowing students to create their own nametag and other activities like coloring pages and searching for buried treasure! It was an interactive fun way to get kids warmed up for the rest of the day while expressing their own creativity. I appreciate the amount of detail that went into placing students with the author that they did their author study on, it was very thoughtful. I got to know Meadow on a personal level and gained insight to the inspiration for her books, her creative process, and her life outside of writing.
I think that the conference can be improved by double checking weeks in advance to make sure that the scheduled rooms are still free, and that what is printed on the event program matches what will be happening. Overall I think this was a fantastic community service experience because I learned that things might not always go as planned from a behind-the-scenes aspect, but when everyone works together to achieve a common goal, things turn out fine. All of us volunteers were working towards the goal of having a memorable, enriching learning conference and really stressed the family aspect – I believe that we achieved that.