Intern Reflections: Vivien He

My name is Yihui He, and you can also call me Vivien. I’m an Education Major intern from the University of Washington, Seattle. And I decided to continue my Master’s after graduation in Learning Science & Human Development. I was born and raised in Daqing, China, and came to the US for school during 7th grade. I would love to see the different aspects of life and challenge myself to be able to help create a community that people feel comfortable living in. Working behind the scenes and promote educational success to all students is something that I feel very interested in and plan to pursue in the future. I will be able to help distinguish educational gaps, design and implement improvements on the real-world educational issues, through my background experiences and the models I’ve learned and will learn in class. Also investigating learning and development of how each culture contributed and applying them to a wide range of contexts, including classrooms, organizations, and different communities.

I came to FamilyWorks out of the Internship Requirement for my Bachelor’s Degree. And I soon got so intrigued by what FamilyWorks does. I got to meet people from a variety of backgrounds. I got to experience what I never experienced before. Some of my intern responsibilities are to help create lesson plans for families with young kids, design programs that meet the participants’ needs, and assist in running events such as Community Closet. Through these experiences, I’ve gained experiences facilitating programs with young kids, became more confident in front of strangers, and really see a corner of the career that I want to pursue in the future.

English Playgroup is a program where children from birth to 5 years old and their caregiver are welcome to attend to come together to play, sing, read, eat snacks and build community. During our English Playgroup session, we always start our class with check-ins with every family, asking about how they are doing and their feelings for the day/week. This way we get to learn at least a little bit of their life. Then we move on to exercises. We try to pick different songs/exercises every time we meet. The kids particularly love “Baby Shark”. They would jump around with the music and do the moves. Just so cute! We also have reading time. Because of COVID, we can’t read the books to them, so we found Book Reading Videos on YouTube. Most of the time, you could tell the kids are loving the book – sitting quietly staring at the screen. These are all really fun activities. We also teach kids colors, ABCs, and shapes. It’s interesting to see the kids showing off their toy collections when we ask them to bring something in their house that’s a particular color/shape. At last, it’s the goodbye song. We try to keep the goodbye song the same every time so that the kids can remember the song and sing along.

The advice I would give to future interns at FamilyWorks is to be respectful and accepting all the time. While working here, you are going to meet people and see things that may far from your life that you’ve never experienced before. There will be times that a participant shares their concerns and stories with you, so be a good respectful listener.