Our school had organized a service program whereby we, senior students had to come together with the underprivileged children, who are from all over the city (mainly from the areas that are near to our school) and teach them something. The program itself consisted numerous different activities in a number of learning sectors like sports, art, and craft including dance and drama. The project aims to develop a caring young, internationally minded person (student) for a better tomorrow not only by fulfilling the needs of a curriculum or a syllabus of a subject but through nurturing us and making us socially responsible in all possible way. However, our grade had been given the duty to be the activity in charge instead to actually teach them.

Learning Outcome 1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

Though there were many activities, I choose Craftwork as an activity where I would like to monitor. Craft is something which I have been enjoying since I have learned about it. It always fascinates me and I too keep doing craftwork whenever I get free time. The reason why I choose this activity was that I would be able to help my peers more which makes me feel happy and content that I would be able to make the children smile. However, doing this CAS activity first seemed as a difficult task as I am not good at handling kids at first hand due to my introvert nature which I had to overcome in order to make the children feel comfortable with us and enjoy the 6 sessions which we were going to conduct.

Knowing your strengths and weakness are important because strengths help to push yourself further while weakness is the area which we lack, and thus we need to improve and develop them, so as to become a better person with a greater potential to do something than before.

This identification of my weakness and strengths had really helped me to make the craft sessions entertaining and fruitful whereby I overcame my weakness by taking an initiative and making the children comfortable to such an extent that they did not hesitate to speak out their views and feeling regarding the craftwork being taught to them.

Learning Outcome 2 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

The program consisted children aged 6 – 15 years which were then divided into 2 groups (6 – 10 years and 11 – 15 years). Handling the children, as I said before, is where I lack at, and thus making them comfortable and relax was a challenge for me. The first session of the activity was the most helpful for me to overcome my weakness as well as the challenge as the sessions’ agenda was to explain them about the activity and what are we going to do in further sessions, in which we also tried to get along with them, making the environment as comfortable for them as possible. The younger kids were the most difficult to handle due to their shy nature. Also, my peers were not able to handle them, thus I had to think of ways in which I can make these sessions entertaining for them and therefore we even played different games which helped us to get to know them better including there likes and names.

Another challenge that I faced was my partner was absent, at the beginning few sessions, which made it difficult for me to handle 30 children altogether. However, with the help of my peers, I tried to manage both the batches by trying to keep a check on both of the batch progress time to time and helping the peers or subordinated whenever needed.

Undertaking the challenges makes me feel that I am capable of much more than what I think, and shows that how much more potential I have for my growth.

Undertaking new challenges is crucial for our life as it develops new skills which in turn is also very important for our growth. Learning something new keeps ourselves active and allows us to succeed at some unfamiliar thing, allowing us to know our potential. This challenge has developed management skills in me and this would definitely help me in my future life, where I need to organize things and manage them so, that the task undertaken is completed on time.

Learning Outcome 3 – Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

Planning is an important aspect of life. It helps an individual to set their goals and mainly offers them directions on how to move on further. While initiating is similarly important because until you don’t take an initiative you won’t achieve the results you desired.

I am a person, who like to organize things as much as possible and thus planning or organizing this activity wasn’t a difficult task. We were already given a list of activities that we need to teach the children, however, the activities weren’t shared with my peers who were actually going to teach the children so they were clueless on what actually do they have to teach them. Also, some of my peers weren’t a player of craft and thus needed someone to show how to actually make them.

Therefore, I took the initiative to mail them the craft to be taught beforehand so that they are prepared and also asked them to see different crafts so that they could themselves teach the ones they like if time is left.

Initiating this activity was not a difficult task because of the effective cooperation between the craft team members and the children.

This activity, however, has helped me to improve my social skills by helping me to communicate more with everyone. Also, this communication has resulted in an effective planning for the activity which could further be taken into consideration while planning in the future.

Learning Outcome 4 – Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences

The activity required dedication to the cause of making the underprivileged children learn something. This craft activity though is my hobby, but still, I sometimes feel lazy on doing it. This session was organized on the weekends, which was the main reason for me to have dedication because first, everyone needs rest on weekends but we had to go to school, secondly, being in the starting of diploma program, understanding everything is important and thus these free days were important for us but we had to give some of our time for the sessions which in all had made me lazy and needed my full concentration and commitment in terms of time and my involvement in the sessions.

Nevertheless, the main motive of contributing something to the society kept me motivated throughout the session and made me committed to accomplishing our goal of teaching the children and making them happy irrespective of the other personal problems.

For me, it is easy to commit to things in which I can contribute. And here I can easily contribute my crafty skills to the other children. Commitment is important for work in which you want excellence in the way you think and the way you work, and thus this passion towards the work makes you committed and persevered towards it.

Learning Outcome 5 – Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

I always enjoy working in teams as it finishes the work faster with sharing of different views and creates a better understanding regarding the team members decreasing the chances of failure if misunderstanding does not occur.

In these sessions, we had to work collaboratively due to the 2-hour limit given to us for completing the activity planned for the day which does not sound a difficult task but becomes one when you have children who are not familiar with craft. Working together wasn’t a difficult task altogether. However, there were small tiffs between the members but this did not lead to any obstacles being created for the sessions.

Also, the best part of our team was that there was no one with which, working together was difficult which, resulted in having smooth and fruitful service session.

The IB Learner profiles that I developed were Communicators – while socializing with the children and team members, Balanced – balancing both studies and the required planning for the session and Caring – taking care of the children and see to it that they are not harmed by the activity.

Finally, the success of our task brought me immense happiness and satisfaction. I learned that being a reason for someone’s smile makes you feel content and eventually leads you to smile with them. Tackling your challenges help you to grow and experience. And lastly, taking out some time for the society and performing a service is important because ” Every Human Deserves A Smile. ”