Our school organized a service program with an aim to teach underprivileged children. This was a step taken to share our knowledge in different extra-curricular activities to those underprivileged children. We had to choose one activity out of the following, football, basketball, volleyball, frisbee, art and craft, dance, cooking, drama and ICT.

I chose to teach football, as it is a sport still developing in India hence it is not well known in terms of the rules and the game. locally speaking, people prefer cricket more than football, so I wish people see football as equally important as cricket. I have been playing this game for a long time and I think this is a game of recreation and fitness.

In one month or 6 sessions with them, we as a group of three made them learn some basic skills and all the rules of football.

Our curriculum included:

• Rules
• Passing
  • Playing Chaos in the circle
• Dribbling
  • Cone Drills
  • Partner Drills
• Shooting
• Full Match

LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

I started playing football 3 years ago. At that point in time, football was a new game for me and in these years I have developed my skills in it. Even though I am not an experienced player in terms of competitions but I have developed many skills like long passes, passing the ball with great accuracy, lobbing a ball and shooting a ball even from a greater distance. However, there are many weaknesses I found out when playing with those kids like I was not able to shoot the ball on target, I lost possession of the ball many times and etc. During the practice we make mistakes to improve but when you are teaching someone, the feeling of failure is much more than what you feeling during your practices, because here many kids rely upon you, they will get wrong information if the teacher isn’t ready. So I identified my weaknesses like this.

During these sessions, I improved upon my management skills as I was able to mark my mistake after every session. Studying those mistakes helped me bring the change in the next session, so there was an improvement there. Following my couch (Mr.Anwer Hans), I learned these skills from him as he takes many classes including our classes, so watching him taking up classes helped me a lot. Still, I think there is a scope for improvement and I will try to bring it by doing such activities. Overall It was a great learning experience, I found things on my to-do list.

LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.

As mention earlier, there were cases when I was unable to show my optimum performance. The trouble of shooting the ball and losing possession. Then there were children of different age group so giving them the same activities was not a suitable idea because there were many kids who were 7-10 years old, so giving the same amount of work as children ages 15 years then there is no point in doing it. We had to observe each and every player and segregate them as per their level and giving them different activities. Apart from the game, we faced a language barrier between us. They were familiar with Gujarati and we faced many difficulties in explaining the game because we might use English words even if we are speaking the same language, we tried to speak close to their dialect but sometimes I think it was a difficult task to do. To make this work productively, we took help of our school sport/helpers staff to explain them in a more fruitful manner. After the session, I noticed a change in my game or performance, because I got to know my weaknesses in this one month. This was mainly because there were some children who approached every problem from a different angle. So sometimes they were able to tackle or take away the ball from us even if they were playing it for the first time. This approach towards the game helped me improved my skills.

LO4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences.

It was difficult to commit to these many sessions because these were during our weekends and we had our exams coming up so giving up 2-3 hours for each session was way too difficult. With school exams, I also had my SAT coming so giving up my SAT practice classes was big deal for me. Since CAS was equally important as any other exam at the time, and we don’t get this wonderful opportunity every day so I showed up for the sessions and didn’t miss any of it. Taking about perseverance, we had many bugs which needed to fix in terms of management was concerned. We got to see some new faces every weekend we came and a lot of children who didn’t attend the previous class, so teaching them everything all over again was something which was not planned. However, the increase in the number of students every session motivated us, as they were enjoying the sport and this was the reason I choose to do this CAS activity, so I was quite committed and focused towards this activity.

LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively. 

We were highly dependent on each other. Handling 50 students would have been an impossible job for me if I were alone. Hopefully, there were 7-8 people including the team leaders which made this job easier. The best way to collaborate with a group is to divide them and give each one of a different task. We did the same, we divided ourselves into 4 groups, we gave them different task according to the students. The students were also divided according to their levels. This was much easier as you get less number of students per head and easier to cater to their doubts.

Overall It was a great experience, I look forward to doing such CAS activities.