In the weekends of the month of September, the third batch of the Service Sessions was carried out in which I had signed up for the sport, Basketball. In these Service Sessions, underprivileged children were invited to the school to learn various skills in Art, Sports etc. from the students of Fountainhead School to gain proper guidance as well as access to the facilities present in the school. Our main purpose of this was to teach these children something which isn’t available to them easily due to different circumstances.

I recognized my strengths in the sport of Basketball that I play almost every day by teaching what I knew about this sport. There were parts of the sport that I was well versed with and could help the children in those parts very well. I also got to know that at which particular thing I am very good at, at what thing am I just good, and at which part I am not that good so that I can work on what I don’t know well and excel at the sport. Now that I am aware on what skill do I need to work on, I focus more on that aspect when I practice myself, and try to include that in the games and tournaments that I will play. Though to my surprise, I realized that teaching newcomers the skills even the ones which you are great at is quite difficult. If I had known better, then I could have come up with more effective strategies or ways to teach the sport. To ensure that they stay interested in learning was also important, as most of them were there to just play and have fun on the court.

To stay committed to teaching was also quite hard to do because we ourselves hadn’t played for a while now, and our desires to play the sport ourselves were also evident, but to avoid that and focus on teaching the children was a sign of perseverance shown by us. For some time, I could still feel the urge to play but to overcome that was a necessary thing that I had to do. In all the things that we do, there has to be a commitment and a person should be persistent towards it. But that’s not me, I easily get distracted by small things and put aside the main things that I have to do, but here that was one of the things I overcame maybe because of the responsibility I felt that the children were eager to be taught in their choice of sport for which they had come to you.

As the number of children who wanted to learn was a lot, and as our aim was to teach properly to each and every one of the children, the number of teachers (student players) appointed was also adequate. Out of us all two best of the players were appointed as the in-charges to handle everyone else and were supposed to give specific instructions to the other students from our school who were present there to teach. We had to work collaboratively among ourselves as 3-4 of us students were appointed to teach 4-5 children who were learning. These were skill-based groups like one group as mentioned above taught one particular skill like passing for example, so the other group was supposed to teach shooting, and like this, other groups were formed, and the children changed their groups after we, the students, asked them to move to another as we had taught our part. And like this overall coaching including all the skills was taught to every child present. If we weren’t as many as we were, managing the children and teaching every individual properly would have been difficult. As I have mentioned, not every one of us was good at everything and to give quality coaching, we needed these many students and we needed them work collaboratively in the way this activity was planned.

I feel that during this CAS activity, I developed the learner profile of Caring because this is a problem that everybody knows something about, but a quite few of those people get involved in activities to resolve this issue of no early institution of sports in a kid’s life, especially underprivileged children. And when we taught them, it felt very good to help them and make a positive difference in their childhood and their nurture. These sessions were very helpful for them as it also is a break from their daily normal school schedule, it was a very informative and practical session which might help them in future if they choose to play this sport. The children were very keen learners as they know that they don’t get many of these types of experiences in their childhood so they try to make the most of it.