(Fulfilled the Activity- dance and Service strand)

Bal Mela is a soul-stirring event organised by our school. It is a one day event where over 15 government schools and 1500+ underprivileged kids from Surat come to our school. This Mela is filled with laughter and joyous interactions. I got the opportunity to be a volunteer at this heartening event. My role in Bal Mela was to conduct the on-stage dance along with 4 other people.

LO1- Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

During this activity, I identified that I am good at interacting with children and teaching them. While there were instances that made me feel frustrated/impatient, I understood that these are young kids from which some are dancing for the first time. And the interactions with them made me smile everytime. It is important for us to know our strengths so that we can apply those and our weakness to convert them into our strengths.

LO3- Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.

Even though initiating and planning the event of Bal Mela was not my project, but for the choreography of the dance we had to plan our time properly. The initiation part came in where we decided a basic and easy choreography for the students keeping in mind that they are small and some might be learning dance for the first time. And the planning was required because students of different school were coming at different intervals and we had to be very quick to perform and teach them different dances so that they enjoy but at the same time take some learning with them.

LO5- Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

Working with others is generally easy for me as I like to divide tasks and then work upon those. This time we were a group of 6 who were teaching a lot of children dance. During this particular activity it was easy for me to work with others because we were all on the same page and we divided ourselves amongst the children and taught them the dance. It is important that we work collaboratively with others as we are always going to have to work in a group. The importance of teamwork in my activity was that if we had not acted as a team, we would have not made this a fun day for the children. As we all were collaborating, the children were enjoying a lot.

LO6- Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

Interacting with children from diverse backgrounds enlightened me about a lot of things that I did not pay much attention to. In our busy lives, we often tend to forget to take a moment and be grateful for everything that we have. Spending time with these children gave me new perspective about how they do not have the opportunity to develop such skills. This experience awakened me and enhanced my global awareness, it taught me more about social inequality. Knowing about this makes me want to take a step ahead to extend my learnings and spread it to such children who do not have the necessary tools to acquire such skills.

LO7- Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions

Bal Mela taught me about the significance of kindness. As a volunteer, I had more than just the responsibility to teach them the dance. I ensured that we created such an environment where the children were comfortable and felt valued. This experience taught me the importance of showing empathy and compassion towards all the members of our community.

The learner profile characteristics that I developed through this activity are-

• communicator- while communicating with the other volunteers to discuss the flow of the day, the choreography and the songs. And also, while interacting with the children as I had to often switch to their mother tongue and use actions to portray what I was meaning.
• reflective- after the service, reflecting on the mistakes made throughout and analysing what could be improved.

This experience was more than just an activity done for our CAS. Interacting with these children taught me a lot about our society. It was delightful to see these children being so passionate to learn the dances.