My first ever CAS experience was service sessions. Our school had invited underprivileged children from different government schools to our school and gave us an opportunity to serve them. The motive was to provide them with the platform, resources, and opportunities they didn’t have.

We were expected to select any activity or sport and teach the children accordingly for 6 consecutive Saturdays. I opted for Dance because I am good at it and I was confident I could teach them well. Our two session was distributed; 10 minutes for warm up, 10 minutes for revising the old choreography and 70 minutes for the new routine.

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

There were a couple of difficulties we faced during the sessions. In the first session itself, we realized that nobody had prepared the routine, so we had nothing to teach and we had limited time. This wasted our 15 minutes. However, we did manage the situation. Some people, including me, were asked to prepare the routine and simultaneously some people were asked to engage the children. Later on, we adapted to this pattern. Every time, we prepared the routine on the spot while the warm-up used to happen. Another problem was that initially, it was difficult to teach and guide them because a lot of the volunteers didn’t know Gujarati. However, we overcame that problem by allowing other volunteers to speak who knew Gujarati and others showed the steps to children.

LO3- Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

Though we didn’t organize the sessions, we had the liberty to plan sessions according to our convenience, meeting the requirements. So while planning the flow of our sessions, we decided to give 15 minutes to the children and let them perform the dances they learnt earlier. According to me, this was the best decision we took because we had so much fun watching them dance.  Apart from that, while we prepared the routine, we tried to make it easy yet elegant and also included their steps sometimes.

LO4- Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experience

Service program had 6 sessions on consecutive Saturdays. This definitely requires commitment. If we wouldn’t be committed, it wouldn’t be a success and children would lose out on their learning. There were times where I didn’t feel like giving my Saturdays, but I stood committed towards these sessions and took my time out. As these sessions were in the starting of the academic year, we didn’t really have so much academic work but there were some CAS activities going simultaneously and I was able to manage them pretty well.

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

All this wouldn’t have been possible without a group. Working collaboratively made our job easy. Also, without a group, we couldn’t overcome the difficulties mentioned earlier. We divided our work pretty well; some people leading the warm, some people preparing the routine and some people teaching the routine. We did have some arguments when our opinions didn’t match, but we sorted them calmly and helped each other.

LO6- Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

In today’s world, there are millions of poor children who don’t have access to food, clothes, shelter, and education. Everybody deserves to have access to such basic elements of life. Therefore, the service session was one small step to make them aware of elements of life and education they wouldn’t have known otherwise. We taught these children a variety of new things and had the best time with them.