Motivate Our Minds

I volunteered at Motivate Our Minds on Highland Dr. in Muncie, Indiana. There I assisted students from grades K-8 with homework and other club activities. The main role I serve is “mentor” or role model. We help the teachers get stuff ready for lesson, snack, and club activities. On a daily basis, we would sign in and separate into the two different classrooms K-4th and 5th-8th. They had different set-ups and I got the opportunity to work in both rooms. In the younger room, we would do homework to start out with and then they had a “tic-tac-toe” worksheet for different activities that the children could work through during the week. They then have a meeting they call “community circle”; where they discuss the things that could have gone better and the things that went great that day. By that time, it is time for the SVS volunteers to leave. In the older kid’s room, they start by doing homework, then they do a journal, and finally they do their different community activities. Slowly, both of the classrooms get released to get snack.

I feel like this connects because the whole point of Motivate Our Minds is to provide kids in the Muncie community with positive role models as mentors. They get to form relationships with adults in the community who may be the only person they know who is enrolled in college. Working individually with these kids who started out as grumpy, rambunctious, nearly hateful people and slowly seeing them transform into lovable, excited, watch-their-faces-light-up-when-you-walk-in people is a precious relationship that this service learning opportunity has given