CAS Service

So far, service is going well. I got a leadership role, so I am the communications manager. I am really happy with this, and I look forward to working to help the service. Within the service, I work collaboratively quite a lot as we separate into groups in order to organise activities. In some sessions I work with my close friends in the activity, especially for reading but then we join other groups for other activities later if they need other people. The group for reading also often changes with others joining or people being absent but so far I think the whole service works well together. It works really well as it is not a huge group and I hope the group dynamic stays the same when the grade 1os leave and grade 9s join.

I have grown in the activity through learning how to present online. It was quite challenging at the start when in our the first session we read a book allowed, but we positioned it wrong, so I could not see an entire paragraph of the story. But since then we have learnt new techniques and figured out how to make it better as well as improve how we tell the story by adding small questions to ask the children in order to keep them engaged. My next step is probably to lead more different types of activity. I have done a couple of just dance-related activities as the children seem to enjoy that but I would like to lead more of those or try to come up with more ideas (though we are very limited online).

Within my communications role, I have written reflections of the services portfolio which is linked here and organised other people to write some. I also spent a session taking photos which are seen on this specific post. I look forward to doing more within this role and helping this service to function effectively.

A challenging experience with the service was the ethics of it as we try to understand the service partners. In one session we planned to have Christmas related activities but in the end, we realised that they might not celebrate Christmas so it might not be relevant to them. We canceled that but since then we have lead a lunar new year session as we thought that they probably celebrate that.

This service works with little kids as we try to do things like exercise with them in order to help the child care centre. The centre is for kids from a lower socio-economic background and our school is partnered with them in order to use our resources to enrich their development. I hope to hold a leadership position this year as I have done this type of service for the last few years and  I really want to help these children. I am quite eager to experience being a part of a leadership team and seeing how that works while working as a group to make the service as good as possible. My only real concern with this service is with the current COVID 19 situation they can not come into school and I am a little nervous about how well young children can focus over online calls. But within COVID, all services have had to adapt and I am sure we will be able to do it. However, I look forward to the challenge and stepping up into a leadership position in order to help these children.