In addition to academic and intellectual learning, it’s crucial to develop and apply practical life skills. These skills can encompass a wide range of activities such as cooking, self-defense, and more. Since food is a vital part of life and cooking is often regarded as an essential survival skill, it’s important to know how to prepare nutritious and delicious meals.

Specifically, in my case, I desired to acquire cooking skills that would enable me to prepare meals I enjoy. I decided to learn a variety of food such as desserts and even some indian dishes. 

The learning outcomes I came across were: 

Learning outcome 1- Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth:

It had been many years since I had prepared small dishes at home, and although I had some cooking knowledge, I still needed to identify my areas of weakness. One time, I wanted to prepare a dish that required chopping vegetables, and it was then that I realized my lack of skill in this area. I had many doubts about my technique, and my vegetable preparation skills were inadequate. Despite the passage of time, I still struggled with preparing raw ingredients, while I was proficient at cooking and presenting dishes.After recognizing this weakness, I began to help my mother in the evenings to improve my chopping techniques and acquire new skills to better prepare raw ingredients.

LO 4: Showing commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences:

Regular involvement and active engagement is a must while initiating a CAS experience. The way I achieved this task is by practicing cooking and helping her in the kitchen whenever possible. To add to that performing and being on live counters during the night while my mother cooked dinner for us. Cooking with mom also helped me to gain experience and learn some traditional dishes.During exams, it became very difficult to take out time for cooking and keep the practice going as if I left the practice I would forget the skills  I had leant in the past.  However, I then had a talk with my mother and asked her to give me some online  which I could practice at home at night or in my free leisure time. This commitment helped me to learn and gain skills in cooking such as chopping, vegetable Sanitation, Kneading the Dough and more. 

Overall this CAS experience was a special one as I got to learn more about my hobby which is cooking.