Duration : 5th august to 20th august ( on weekends )

The community service programme at FS involves underprivileged students from a plethora of schools around FS. These students visit our school for 3 consecutive weekends, where they spend time with us and participate in different activities such as arts and crafts, Dance, Football, ICT, Science projects etc…

As a person who volunteered in the community service programme in the arts and crafts activity, we were divided into many groups so that the underprivileged children could have a better one-to-one and hands-on experience. I attended community service all 3 weekends, we taught the students to make paper snakes, marble bookmarks, watermelon fans, leaf art etc…The community service experience was overall a fruitful, pleasant and a little bit anarchic experience, both of us; the underprivileged students and FS students, were new to each other, so it took us a bit of time to familiarize ourselves. One of the major drawbacks was the communication gap, most of the children didn’t fully know Hindi we were supposed to communicate with them in Gujrati, but not all FS students knew Gujrati thus the communion between the Fs students and Underprivileged children could have been smoother. We were supposed to refer to videos of crafts that we were going to teach but instead of instructing them and making them do exactly what was shown we provided them with creative liberty, and let them choose what designs they wanted to create. after the first weekend, the students were able to recognize me and my group members and came running to us to greet us. These little things made us more enthusiastic to teach them more crafts.

LO5 – demonstrate skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.

Working collaboratively with all the other group members was a pivotal factor in order to correctly guide the underprivileged children visiting FS in this 3-weekend programme. With the intention of providing the children with quality learning experience, we divided our group into 2 parts. For certain projects like origami which did not involve as much chaos and personal attention on individual children, we would teach the children as one. This would work out great for us since we were able to provide the children with our undivided attention.

LO4: Show commitment and perseverance in the CAS experience

The commitment in this CAS experience was to show up every weekend and teach the underprivileged children new Art and craft skills. This may sound easy to show up every weekend but after the first weekend, it gets phlegmatic, especially on Sundays since we as students are not used to waking up early and coming to school on Sundays. What motivated me to keep going was the impact that we as volunteers made on these underprivileged children, by teaching new skills every weekend.

LO7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.

I have grown up in a privileged background , but interacting with these underprivileged children made me realize that I have access to quality education , and I have safe space to grow. whereas These children don’t have what I have. I really think this 3 weekend programme provided the children with a really beneficial opportunity.