Underprivileged children from government school attended the service session which was held in fountainhead school by students. The underprivileged children were given an opportunity to learn different things like sports, art, cooking, dancing and many more. The program was 6 weeks long. I was a part of the program and taught the young children how to cook different types of dishes. Service session gave me an opportunity to learn more dishes and also help others learn them. I have always loved cooking and also have been eager to learn new dishes. My aim was to help children learn healthy and tasty food in less time and money. Through this, I learned something new that can help them in their life ahead and simultaneously had fun.
The service sessions helped me change my thinking towards providing service to underprivileged people. The sessions helped me to be kind toward everyone and also treat everyone equally.
The learning outcomes that I covered through the sessions are-
LO 2- Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
Through the service session, I identified my own strengths and weaknesses. I realized that it was very difficult for me to interact with some of the students as I was not able to speak proper Gujarati. I also felt like I should work on it so that in future I do not face any difficulties from next time. Even after not able to speak with some of the kids I tried to overcome the difficulties by taking some help from my friends and asking them to help me to speak better.
LO 3- Initiate and plan a CAS experience:
We the students were given an opportunity to select the activity we would like to teach. We then divided the batch of the students into 2 batches so that it is easy for us to teach them. We had some support of school staff and teachers. As we were not permitted to decide the dishes we would like to make, it was a little difficult for us to cook them. We all meet in some of the break times and planned how to manage all the children. As mentioned before the language barrier was faced by me and I tried my best to overcome it by the help of other students. The volunteers (we) also divided them self’s in 2 groups on the first day and did follow the groups for all other days. Through this, we were prepared to teach them and did not face many difficulties.
LO 5-Demonstrate skills and benefits of working collaboratively
The team help me a lot by covering my weaknesses and helping me to improve on them. They not only helped me stay motivated throughout the sessions but also made me work hard and harder every day. We all coordinated well with each other to make the service sessions run smoothly. Working as a team helped us to handle all the students and make it fun for them.
LO-7- Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.
A lot of volunteers were not really interested in the service session. They were seen loitering around or not working for the betterment of the underprivileged students. This showed how demotivated students were to work and provide service. However, I gave my hundred percent and helped those children to learn something new so that it can help in further in their life.
