Kahaani has been an activity/ event that I have participated in since the 9the grade. This year Priyanka and I had made the decision to audition to be dance leaders. We planned, and collaborated and were given the chance to lead a dance. Leading in Kahaani came with many challenges, people not showing up, unexpectedly quitting, getting COVID, and time management. However, it was incredibly rewarding. Our dancers picked up the dance really well during our short practices and performed beautifully.

Leading with a partner helped improve my collaboration and communication skills as we had to decide music, choreo, formations, costumes, everything really in a way that both of us were happy with the choice.

Priyanka and I signed up to become Kahaani leaders. We had to be proactive and organised making time to choose the music, choreo the dance etc. Even though we had a two-week break to do the majority of the planning and preparation there was a lot of other things which also had to be done. EE’s, essays, college apps, etc, as such both Priyanka and I had to compromise and find a time that would work for both of us in order to do the work we had to. During this process another challenge that we faced was a compromise, deciding on a theme, songs, and dance steps was a challenge at times because we sometimes had different ideas of what we wanted to have done. However, I feel that we did a good job of compromising and collaborating.

When we get back to school our practice starts on Wednesday and we have to try and split our group of 18 dancers (20 including us) into groups for the different songs. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, some of our ideas for formations and grouping would not be very feasible so we have to do some brainstorming. Kahaani this year also has a very short deadline and it is going to be a challenge to balance dance leader responsibilities with the ton of other work we have to do. However, I am confident we will be able to do it. Due to the short timeline of this years kahaani performance, we also have to ensure that dancers are able to learn the entire dance properly.

Our dance is the first dance and our theme is to be an introduction to kahaani and voice of world. Our songs and on the slower side and the steps are more cute/ sweet. We are very happy with our allocations because we feel that having mostly grade 12 dancers serve as an advantage because they would be able to pick up the dance steps quickly and would likely be more confident. Overall we are very excited to get started on the process of teaching our dance and preparing for these years kahaani performance.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g-D0-cvDfRkvzHtUw4NQtE7EQkJNaeg6/view?ts=609fb97f

#LO1, #LO3, #LO5, #LO6

#LO1, #LO3, #LO6.

Season 3 Service Reflection

• Planned and created a pickup zone for our plants for a better organisation to help people pick it up. This collection zone was made with the aim to help our service partners know where to pick and drop plants and pots. (#LO3)
• We also started working in bigger pots so that we could work achieve our goal of ethical consumption. We put larger tomato plant, mint, and sunflowers which allowed us to have a sustainable replenishable source. The seed industry has a monopoly and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism…. so we decided to try and create our own seeds. This was successful for the passionfruit plants in the beginning which we grew from the fruit by cleaning and picking individual seeds. We are finding a way to do this long-term as there are issues regarding watering the plants during holidays. For example, after exam leave, I visited the garden yesterday and saw that our sunflowers were almost dead. (#LO6) (#LO7)
• We are constantly reflecting and communicating with our club members on how to improve. We do lots of projects with trial and error to see what works best for us in this climate and garden with the soil and resources we have. We are teaching the grade 9’s the basics and now they have gotten the hang of propagation. We are now trying to see/ plan how to be sustainable in the LR. (#LO5)

Linked is the Reflection which Shreya and I (The founders/chairs of the NeuroScience Society) recorded after our last session for grade 11. We decided to end this week (right before the April break ) as after we come back exams for most of the members (who are in grade 10) will commence, and it wouldn’t be very realistic for our members to attend.

We are looking forward to taking the next steps for our club including Promoting for next year, Printing sticker, and deciding on how to pick our new chairs.

#LO3 #LO4 #LO5 #LO7

On this Wednesday lunchtime, one of our NeuroSoc Members held a movie screening to raise awareness for brain awareness week. As chairs, it was very motivating to see members of our club so engaged and wanting to take initiative for the activity. We screened a short Netflix documentary called the mind explained. We specifically watched the ones about dreams and memory, which are both topics we learnt during club time. Many people attended the screening (some from our club as well).  Shreya and I attended too and enjoyed it a lot. Facilitating passionate members of our club is always inspiring and makes us really happy for the future of our club. People in our club have shown the initiative and interest to chair and lead next year.

For Brain Awareness, we also made posters and stuck them up around the school, as well as a big poster of a brain to help raise awareness for our club. As a club, we discussed many ideas for raising awareness. Such as short videos, posters, and movie screening. Here are some of the things we made. Below I have also linked our logo which we plan to use when raising awareness for our club and just as a nice symbol for our group. (We have a few ideas and are still narrowing down). #LO3,1,5.

Neurosoc Documentary Poster

Recently we have had a Careers fair in which a neuroscientist researcher was present. Due to high demand spots filled up very fast and many people who were interested in learning about neuroscience didn’t get their opportunity. Shreya and I took the initiative to help people in our activity get the opportunity to talk to. We emailed and set up a meeting with her over the Chinese New Years break. We told her about our club and what we do it in.

During the meeting which was the first lesson back, she talked to us about her job and her journey to becoming a researcher. It was very useful to understand the steps she took to get where she is. Our members were very engaged and we had an hour-long discussion where we asked many questions. She talked about her experience in interning in hospitals and provided many anecdotes.

#LO1, #LO3, #LO6

During the last weekend, before school ended, I chaired at UWC’s annual MUN conference. I was a deputy chair in DISEC. This was my second time chairing a MUN conference, however, this conference was under different circumstances. Covid changed the way MUN was conducted. Conferences were moved online and this was the first time that I handled a zoom conference. It required a lot of multi-tasking and training beforehand. We learned how to work the different features, make breakout rooms, change settings and it was all very technical As this was the conference was around the end of the year it was a very busy time. I had test’s, assignments, and essays which were piling up. Seeing as this conference was the entire weekend I was forced to test my organisation and time management skills. Using all the time I had very efficiently. It was an incredibly stressful 2 weeks but I managed to have a positive attitude through the conference trying to enjoy and concentrate on being in the now. As each committee had 2 chairs rather than three there was also a lot of collaboration between me and the head chair. We called before the conference and planned how we were going to handle it. We tried to split the work evenly and made it manageable. Near the end of the conference, the chairs had to pick out delegates for awards. This is often a hard thing to do as there are many skilled and talented delegates however we used our best judgement and chose delegates who we felt deserved it. Another challenge which I did not expect was concentrating during the conference, being online can be challenging as it becomes very easy to tune out just by looking away from your screens, As the conference lasted more than 8 hours a day we had to be on our screens for extended time periods. Just as I had some trouble concentrating so did most of our delegates. At times debate would slow down and the zoom meeting would be silent. The head chair and I had to find ways to help the delegates get back into debating. We understood the challenge as both of us had previously been on online MUN conferences. At times we would ask prompting questions or even participate in debate with something controversial to make the delegates more interesting.

#LO2 (challenge) #LO3 (Initiative) #LO5 (collaboration)

Initiative and Planning for Urban Gardening Service: Yesterday during Service we planned our goals and Aims for the rest of the year. Below is the table which includes our goals and our plans on how to achieve them. Mrs Jackyl also told us about the local significance of our activity, 6 or 7 activities are directly impacted by our service, the plants we grow are used by the primary, middle and high school gardening activities, The sustainabrew, Raw beauty, Composting and East farmers market use our plants. We also talked about our aim to become more Sustainable by making our own seeds and encouraging donations. We also talked about Awareness and how we want to showcase our successes and encourage others to start gardening. We have planned some informational videos about how to plant and work on improving our portfolio/padlet/websites. We discussed the SDG’s that we focus on. As chairs, Isabel and I came up with these ideas and collaborated with the communication officers, Eddie and Raghavi in our group. One of the other initiatives that we are starting is to create a seed bank. We discussed the Svalbard seed vault in Antarctica, Where countries from all over the world send their heirloom seeds, that way if any nuclear war or natural disaster occurred and civilisation would have to restart we would have access to seeds. Currently, Six large firms dominated the sale of seeds and agricultural chemicals in 2015 in the United States and around the world: BASF, Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta. This is dangerous as most people will not have access to seeds. Learning to plant and creating our own seeds is very important on a global scale