Bal Mela is a fun and exciting event that happens at Fountainhead School every year. This isn’t an event to just interact with underprivillage children but also an opportunity for studnets at Fountainhead to volunteer and express their interests in skillfull activities. To be the part of same, I volunteered for games where we engaged with kids to play Dog and bone.

LO1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

My strength lies in communication, and even my mother tongue is gujarati so it was easier to bond up with those kids. As those students only spoke their native language and I could speak those languages , gujarati and hindi. Besides, due to past experiences of community service and rural immersion programs, I did have an experience of talking to young underprivillaged children, which eased my interaction with them. Next, the game that we were playing with them was Dog and Bone, which I was adequtely familiar with, and had played myself lot of times before, so teaching about those rules and guiding them on how to play the game was easier and became a strength for volunteering during Bal Mela.

LO4 – Show perseverance and commitment in CAS experience

Since it was too hot, we were already sweating without doing any work. Besides, the kids werent as active as we thought they would be. Girls were less enaggeing in the game than boys. Due to several other activities going around, we also faced the difficulty in communication and making kids focus on Dog and bone only. Despite facing all these challenges, we ensured to find ways to engage kids in playing dog an d the bone. For instance, instead of saying out number out loud we started clapping and stopped when we had to show a number using our hands along with saying it out loud, which helped us in cancelling the noise disturbances and make kids stay focused on their game only. Also to engross girl in playing the game, I started playing with them which made me feel intersted as they felt that we were enjoing too with them and were not just making them play for the sake of it. However there came a point where we were exhausted and felt like giving up and just rest instead of standing in the skating rink, but to overcome that challenge we started interacting with children once we are done with playing or beofre starting to play , this not only gave us a gap to rest but also allowed the kids to engage.

LO5 – Demonstrate skills and benefits of working collaboratively

I would have defintely not been able to pull the activity of Dog and the Bone alone, if I didnt had my friends by my side. We all worked collaboratively by hearing each other ideas to overcome the challenges and tackle our problems cooperatively. For instance, due to alot of crowd, we divided ourselves into pairs, and chose to handle two batches simultaneaously, where one pair handled one batch. Such decision eased our process of conducting the game and allowed us to handle on our own. But, due to no.of people getting divided, now the communciation became more difficult and that is when we came up with teh clapping system which made children stay focused on the speaker and see her gestures to count the number, and check if they have to go or not.