Arts and craft has always been my happiness. Years ago when I was a child I used to do plenty of arts and craft activities with my sister and my mother and it always made me happy and excited.  Arts and craft is one of the activities that I have enjoyed doing and had fun creating different products out of . Playing with all the stationeries and making a mess out of it was the best part. My most favorite part of this is painting, I mean who doesn’t love playing with colors and creating a completely weird and unique thing out of it?

Once I got to hear that the school is organizing community service and it also includes art and craft, I could not just wait for myself. Community service is where we teach/play/ dance with the underprivileged students from the government schools. This year I selected arts and crafts because I wanted the students to experience the fun and make something that could make them smile. Choosing arts can craft as a part of community service was really helpful and fun.

LO 1:Identify your own strength and develop areas for growth.

Talking about identifying my own strength and limitations, I already knew that teaching students below my age is one of my strength as I as a sister have taught my younger cousins and It has always been easy for me to handle kids and teach them, However I am not a person who socializes easily and can get comfortable with others, thus this was one of my weakness that I identified in this CAS experience that I take time to start talking be it kids or any other people, being an introvert has always been my weakness.

In the initial session of community service I was very shy and and I did not knew what to do which was very difficult for me to understand myself, but since I got to know my strengths and weaknesses I felt a little more open up after my first session and was then able to talk to the kids freely and was enjoying it. The main reason for us to know our own strengths and weaknesses is because, so that we can know where we are lacking behind and then we can figure out a solution how to overcome our weakness. If we don’t know our weaknesses then how can we improve ourselves in that area? It is really important for a person to get to know their weakness so that they can try to overcome it and achieve something that they want. As per knowing the importance of our strength, we can try to do more than what we can and think outside of the box by achieving more than what we can.

As I mentioned above that It was first difficult for me to achieve my weakness at the beginning but as we continued with the community service session I became more familiar with the atmosphere and with the kids around me. Throughout the sessions I was able to overcome my weakness and at the end I was proud of myself and it made me really happy seeing the kids smile and having a good time with us.

LO 2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process:

The most challenging part of this community session was for me to communicate. The kids who were from the government school, all belonged to gujarati school and most of the students were communicating in gujarati. It was challenging for me to communicate with the kids in Gujarati and It was very hard for me to understand and explain to them how to follow the steps. Not only this but since the kids were not understanding what I was saying, it was very difficult for me to overcome this and try to speak in gujarati.

The reason why speaking in gujarati was a challenge to me was because I belong to a marwari family, and everyone in that family speaks either hindi or marwari, thus I never learned speaking in gujarati even tho living in gujarat I was not knowing how to converse in that language. Therefore I was finding this one thing very difficult for me to interact with. However after the first few sessions of community service I tried talking in Gujarati with the children by saying the things that I already knew but it was not helping, I fumbled a lot and I still was not able to talk with them fluently. 

LO 5:Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively:

Generally working with others at first has always been difficult for me, because being an introvert I usually socialize less and I am not good at communicating with others at our first meet.Therefore at the beginning of community service it was difficult for me to communicate with the kids and I was not comfortable with them.However as we continued with this experience I was getting to know each of the children and what are their likes and dislikes.

Working collaboratively with others and having the strength to work patiently is a skill. There are people who can not work with others and are meant to do their own things by their own, but as per me I can work in a group where the people arround me are kind and generous. In this case I was surrounded by people speaking in gujarati, working with them at first was difficult but since I knew how to understand this language, it helped me overcome this difficulty for me and at somepoint I could manage to work with these people.

Our school has alway taught us that collaboration skills are really important for one’s lifestyle. Working with a bunch of people and forming a group shows us how well we can communicate with each other and resolve any problems between them. We can even check our patience level while working in a group, that how calm and respectful we are towards people, not only this but working collaboratively can also kill time, for example if 1 person can do a particular work in 5 hours then a group of people can complete that same work in 1 hour, it’s that simple.