Our school offers a variety of different art forms under a category of art’s special (AS) like Visual arts, Dance, Drama, Vocals, cooking, Bharatanatyam, Keyboard, Percussion, and Guitar. This program is offered from grade 5 onwards. We have to choose one particular skill and learn it for a whole academic year, and towards the end of the year, we have arts performance where we show our learnings to our parents. I chose cooking as I love cooking food and we also explore and learn many different types of cuisines and desserts. We learn different styles of cutting and chopping, garnishing and how can we present the food.
LO1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth.
Since it was my second year in cooking, I knew a lot of things amongts the beigners. I identified my major strengths in cutting and chopping. I could cut any vegetables and fruits in different types of cutting and chopping styles, like, fine dice cutting, julienne cut, macedoine cut (large dice), slicing, crushing and parallel cutting. But when it came to frying and making Indian sabjies with round chapaties, I lacked great amout of skills there and also I was not confident enough to make it. Hence, I made a goal to polish my skill by doing major amount of frying, making sabjies and chapaties during the cours of 1 year of my cooking class. I believe that by the end of the year, I improved a lot. I believe that knowing our strengths and weakneses is one of the key part at doing better at work, in my case it was cooking. It also helped me identify that there were many students who were good with diffent cokking cooking styles.
LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
I faced challanges woking on my weakness as learing stir-frying, round chapaties and Indian sabjies in a short period of time was a task. We only had 1 cooking slot per week and also something it went away due to some lecture. So, I had to practice at home along side do my studies. Practicing everyday was a task because of my tight schedule but I did try my best to at least 20-30 mins. I knew if I keep trying and dedicated myself to it, I would achieve my goal and I did. Also with this, I was able to improve my time management skills which helped me in my studies as I was able to meet all the deadlines and still manage to get some self time.
LO4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences.
This activity required commitement in order for me to do better then before, learn new skills and sharpen the skills I’m already good at. I had to be dedicated as it was my IBDP year 1, I already had much so much study work and by the end of the year we had deadlines too, but I knew if I didn’t show commitment towards cooking I would never be able to learn and sharpen my skills. Thus I’m happy with my self that I was able to make an effort into someting I want to learn and like doing.
To me commitment seems hard to make, but actually very easy one you how to do it. If one figures out a way to do a works, its no more a commitments, it becomes a part of daily schedule.
LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
Working with others, now, is not a task of me, actually I like working with others and it is generally easy for me as I play a game called Ultimate frisbee where I have to work with my team. But also I don’t like anybody interfering in my task for say, I’m chopping then I have to do it on my own only. We were less students in our batch so everybody had some or the other work to do, if one is chopping then other is working on gas and likewise. Along with our teacher we also had didi (helper) in our class who told us certain old techniques of doing work in an easy way. We also had disscusions on how to make a certain dish better and tasty. Everybody had different opinions and every opinion seemed good enough to try, so we tried to make the best option after few classes from the day the dish was being prepared. To me teamwork and collaboration within a group as, if we dont cooperate then once in a while it might happen that more number of vegetables will be chopped then required, henceforth there would great deal of wastage. So working collaboratively benefits everybody and is vital.
LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
We always try to not to waste food as many people in the words goes to sleep without having a single bite. We are priviliged that we get such good food, so make sure that whatever is being cooked during our cooking classes is being consumed or is give to some poor people out side our school. This way the food did not get wasted and someone had a good meal.
LO7: Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.
Ethics during cooking plan an important role as we had rules to adhere to while cooking. Rules like, fulls pants and shoes are compulsory while cooking or near stove so that we can be safe if any incident occurs. We were expected to follow school food policy that is, we cannot make any junk food expect on fridays and we strickly needed to follow it. Also another important area we focused was not to waste food, as every day food is being wasted in school which can be fed to minimum 40 people. So, we made sure that whatever is being made in the kitchen is being consumed and not wasted.
To conclude this, I had a lot of fun learing new skills and sharpening my already learnt skills. Also, I achieved my goal by the end of the year because of which I’m satisfied with myself and I could use this skill where ever I go in future.
