I participated in our school’s community service program as a volunteer. This event gave me the chance to help underprivileged children, something I’ve always loved doing. There were a total of 6 community service sessions held at the school on the weekends, each of which allowed us to spend two hours with the kids. We engaged in a variety of activities, including sports (football, frisbee), dance, science experiments, and arts and crafts. Since I had never had the chance to show my talent in dance, I decided to teach it to underprivileged children at this event.

The SDG goal of quality education was connected with my CAS experience because in this event we allowed the underprivileged students to learn inclusive quality education in the form of dance which they didn’t get to learn in their day-to-day life. So this gave the underprivileged students a great opportunity to get hands-on activities and explore various different activities.

LO 1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
I learned that I can perform various steps that I haven’t felt confident doing while teaching dance to children. The difficulties I had were that I had performance anxiety and I wasn’t very open while dancing on stage and instructing kids, but due to this, I overcame my fears and felt comfortable teaching the children.

LO 3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
To make the students learn to dance, We had to prepare the songs and steps which we had to teach them. I was working in a group, where we had to preplan all the ideas. It was difficult to come to common ground because all the volunteers had different ideas to conduct the sessions. So, we had to be considerate and open to all perspectives. By listening to other’s perspectives and ideas, I discovered many new skills. Planning the activities beforehand is very important because it helps in the framework and controls the work more effectively. Having this experience will help me in the future to work in a group where people would have different ideas and how to balance out the right decisions. 

LO 4: Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
I stayed committed by attending all 6 sessions though I had different classes or had to study on the weekend for the assessments and complete the assignments. It was very difficult to manage all the children because all of them were from different age groups. We had to keep simple and basic steps that every age group kid could do. Also, at times we had to change the steps on the spot, while we had pre-planned but when the children weren’t able to do that step we had to change it. 

LO 5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively
While teaching the children to dance, we divided them into smaller groups. This gave us the chance to collaborate and give each child our best effort.

In conclusion, this experience helped me overcome my fears, allowed me to show my talent, and improve my communication skills. This also taught me to treat everyone with equal respect and kindness whether they be from any background or school. 

Learner Profiles:
Communicator – I was confident while communicating with the children and made the sessions more interactive. I was very friendly and also while collaborating with the volunteering team we communicated well to come to common groundings.
Caring – I was empathic to all the children and taught every person at their own pace. With compassion and respect, we were able to make the children feel comfortable with us while making them give their 100 percent involvement in the learning.

Evidence: