Our school had taken an initiative to help the unprivileged children from rural areas to teach them something in their interests. Senior school students were given this opportunity to come on three weekends plan an activity based on their interest and guide the children. I have always been interested in arts so I selected it as my interested and planned out the activity.

Vaidehi and I were in charge of the art team so I had to make sure that everybody had an activity planned out and that these sessions do not go as waste. So to make sure a document was already created where the activities were mentioned and only instructions had to be followed on a day-to-day basis. The challenge was that I did not exactly know about their level in arts and about their prior-knowledge so I had to figure that out and plan my activities accordingly. So we had divided children on the basis of their age so there were children in groups of 6-7 each. We taught them how to draw basic shapes and objects and later we taught them how to make things from waste. So we made caterpillars from the caps of poster color bottles, spectacles from DVD.

The learning outcomes achieved:

L02- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process. So a lot of children were not able to communicate with us properly as they were a bit shy to open in front of us but we started asking some common questions so slowly they started opening up and also some children only understood Gujarati which was an issue for some of the senior school students but since other students and I know Gujarati so the issue was solved.

LO3 -Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience. As Vaidehi and I were the in charge we planned out everything from the beginning as to how the groups will be divided and the resources we will be needed. We needed to organize as the requirements for the resources needs to be informed to the school prior so that they can check if the resources are available in school and if not they can order it.

LO4- Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences. The service sessions took place on the weekends so we had to make sure that we manage our academic tasks beforehand and come to school on weekends. So for three weekends, we had to sacrifice our sleep and wake up early for three weeks continuously but it was all worth it at the end.

LO5- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively. So collaboratively here does not mean working together but it can also mean to assign tasks to each senior school student. So we had assigned each group of around 6-7 children to one student so that there is no chaos and each student can get attention. So working collaboratively made each task easy and more effective.

LO7- Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions. As the children were small we need to take care that we need to explain things slowly to them and also the tone should be polite and welcoming. The children also did not have a very good background so we don’t have to treat them as they are less than any of us as in unfortunate. So taking our actions and words into consideration before speaking was crucial.

At the end of the day, it was an opportunity which I am grateful as it made me grateful for what I have today and also made me feel satisfied that maybe I helped some of them by discovering their talents or inspired them in some way or the other.