There are community service session held at FS wherein students from NGO are invited to attend these sessions to learn some new activities. These also give them opportunities to improve their skills .we as FS students help the NGO students to learn different activities like art and craft, dance, football, basketball, frisbee, cooking. Among the above activities, I opted for cooking. cooking is personally something I enjoy doing myself .so I felt, opting for this would be interesting and a good learning experience for myself .it was a unique opportunity. The didi’s at FS were always ready to help us during the sessions. We used to provide the NGO students help in areas like cutting, chopping while simultaneously teaching cooking to them.

the challenges I faced and how did overcome them:

• interacting with the kids

initially, I was very excited about conducting service sessions. But with time I realized that interacting with the students was not as easy as I anticipated .it was difficult to communicate with them as I belonged to different language base.language was a challenge I had to overcome .so I tried to converse in regional language as fluently as I could. understanding the language wasn’t difficult, but replying and explaining the same poised a problem .it was this challenge wherein I decided to overcome by becoming better at the language and improving my speaking skills.

LO1: Identify your own strength and develop areas of growth

• As cooking is something which I find interesting and I am inclined towards I opted for it. We made different things on every single Saturday. sometimes the dishes were known to me and sometimes it was not. So because of these service sessions, I got to learn new dishes also.

LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.

• Though we could understand the language yet explaining and speaking was a problem .so, I had to overcome the challenge of becoming fluent in that language. This would ensure effective communication between us.I also developed the skill of learning a new language.

LO4: show commitment to and perseverance in a CAS experience

• Even though the service session was on Saturdays which was a non-working day for us, we participated with the same zeal and enthusiasm looking forward to making the kids learn something new and different every time.

LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.

• By working together as a team we get to learn from each other.we also develop skills by getting inspired from each other .working together help us develop team spirit .we also learn how to work unitedly as per the circumstances

LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.

As the children come from an unprivileged background it is quite obvious that their parents are working and cannot keep a check on their kids all the time so, lack of guidance seemed to be an issue here. when we teach them cooking first of all it adds up a lot to their skills and secondly if they know to prepare basic dishes it makes them certainly independent and being kids also they don’t have to depend on someone.

community service taught us that helping others is a very good way of giving back to the society .in helping others, we help ourself, as we realize our weakness also.