Every year, Grade 11 organizes a farewell party for their seniors to give them an uplifting ending. This year it was our chance to organize this event and as an outcome, we made that day memorable for both the grades. Around 45-50 students organized this event. To make things easier, we divided ourselves department wise, I was a part of the decorating and dance team. The main aim of the decorating department was to make the venue as attractive as possible. All the dances were to entertain our seniors and keep them away from all the tension surrounding the finals exams and all.
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
Organizing such big events requires a lot of planning because this cannot be done in 1 or 2 weeks. For this event, we started searching for ideas a month ago. First, we decided the theme of this farewell, as there were a lot of minds sitting in the room, the number of ideas were also more. So we came up to a topic which was the theme of expression. We came up to this topic by voting, which was again a difficult task. After that, we started planning about which events we will include in the show, so again the same method of choosing the topic was done.
Talking about planning department wise, we had to do a lot of secondary research for all the decoration part. We also had to come early to school every day to complete all the decoration so that we don’t have to change our regular school schedule for that. To make a show perfect, the most important thing is time management. We had to make sure that all the props and everything is ready before the deadline. We also had managed all this work with our school stuff, which made everything difficult to complete on time. To initiate everything, we had to coordinate with each other and make sure that there are minimal internal conflicts.
LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
As mentioned earlier, it wouldn’t have been possible to organize this event without teamwork. We all had to work collaboratively to complete our work as soon as possible. Even if our work for a certain department was over, we used to help the other departments if they need any. As it was a student-led event, we had to come up with the ideas and then we only had to execute them. The teachers were only supposed to judge the performances and let us know where we can make improvements. So working collaboratively was a must.
LO7-Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
As this was a school event, there are certain prohibitions which may violate the school policies. For example, even the songs for the dance should not use slang words or should not question the required behaviour in school. Then we also borrowed a few artworks which could be used for decoration from the art team. So we took proper care of it and returned it, even if it was a small art piece. In this process of decoration, we made sure that there was minimal wastage of resources. We made sure that no extra resource is ordered, we only re-ordered when everything ordered previously was used. So in such situations, ethics of choices and actions came into the picture.
From this event, we could learn many things like time management, self-management, social skills, communication skills and many more. Throughout this process, I also used learner profiles like communicator, open-minded and knowledgeable. Overall it was a great CAS experience, probably one of the best because of the learnings and the fun we had in organizing this event.
