Category: CAS

Having completed a whole year of service throughout grade 11, I certainly feel like this CAS experience has had a relevant impact on me. Unfortunately, the year did get cut short due to COVID although I do believe I really made the most of this experience. One of the most rewarding things from the service was the ability to establish strong connections with our partners. From the first day we met until the last, I was partners with Ng Hung Khim. I felt like him and I developed special connections that got stronger throughout the year.

I definitely feel like there is global significance to my service as it is important to engage and interact with your wider community. To see many children teaching older people was really powerful for me. Personally, I felt like I didn’t really have the ability to teach older generations as I am a student myself and it was quite strange to be in the opposite role. It was valuable to see how people can take their different strengths to help other people and vice versa.

Throughout the year I have recognised the ethics of my actions within service. By simply doing these reflections I am thinking about the actions and impact that I have made. I also think it is important to recognise how, as a group, we have grown and become more efficient, collaborative and overall provide a better experience for the care centre residents. Another valuable component was when the grade 9 & 10’s joined our service near the end of grade 11 and we were able to teach them and explain to them everything, passing on the service and saying goodbye for them to carry on working with our partners.

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Given the conditions of COVID 19, it meant I was not really able to properly pursue my interest in DJing as the deck was at school. All things considered, I signed up to do one season of DJ Club and consolidated many of the skills that I picked up in grade 11. Attached are videos of me utilizing theses skills and practising using the crossfade along with the filter. I have found that my ability to match up beats has become much better and I able to do it much more quickly and efficiently.

I believe I have shown true resilience and perseverance in developing these elemental DJ skills as I could have just been satisfied with fulfilling seasons 3&4 of CAS yet I felt it was necessary to do a bit more practice to really convince myself that I understand the basics of “DJing”

Having nearly completed my third season of HS DJ Club I definitely feel this a sparked a true interest and passion for me. I think I am likely to continue something like this in the future and maybe even pick up my own DJ board somewhere and experiment myself!

Video 1

Video 2

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Project week was looking to be a really exciting time for my group and me, we were really looking forward to the invaluable experiences that we would have. I felt that despite us not being able to actually go on Project Week, the planning aspect of it was really important. We went through the same process that any other grade 11 student would have done.

Initially, we encountered problems with not being able to find approved creativity or service components to match our activity. But we were working towards fixing that.

I think in terms of working together as a group it was mainly 2 or 3 out of the 5 that were doing the majority of the work. I was included in that and did most of the planning with our my friend.

I think I have definitely learnt what it means to plan a CAS experience. Overall with the planning, communication and collaboration, I learnt a lot. I don’t think our efforts will be completely wasted as our group may plan to execute the week over one of the holidays which could be quite fun!

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My service is arguably one of my most gratifying CAS experiences. Every week I am able to have a positive impact on someone’s life. The best thing about my service is the relationships that we develop with our partners.  Having worked with Ng Hung Khim every week I feel like I know him quite well and it is nice to see our relationship grow. Like my Activity and Creativity components of season 3, Service was also put to a stop due to COVID 19, although this was the case, we did have some fair warning. Because of this, we were able to record a plethora of video tutorials a put them in a drive folder. The partners could access them and view them, I think it may even be more helpful because with a video you could rewatch it if you didn’t understand something in particular.

We would opt for google hangouts or zoom but for the likes of our partners, we decided that it would be more efficient to make video tutorials and they could view them at their own will.

I think this service has taught me that something we take for granted may not be so easy for someone else to grasp, this issue can be adapted to a global scale quite easily in the sense that you should appreciate what you have and help those who don’t have it. Int his case its the skill of using technology. Clearly a very important skill in the 21st century.

In addition to this, I think having done this for nearly a whole academic year,, my actions have certainly had some impact on the members of the care home and that my and my service’s actions have not gone unnoticed.

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For season 3 & 4 I signed up for DJ club, not really knowing what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised. We started out with really basic “beatmatching” and “dropping it in on the 1”. As there was only one DJ turntable in the room we had to take a turn practising our skills. Although some may have viewed this as an obstacle, I found it to somewhat enhance my experience, I found that I was able to learn from others and try to better my own performance in doing so. In addition to this, with everyone watching it felt like a mini audience!! As different students were in different places in their progress it was important to be respectful of others. DJ club also showed me the importance of collaboration, sometimes other people may not get it the first time so in working together we were able to solve the problem and better ourselves. Overall season 3 was really quite enjoyable and was quite a shame to see it come to an end so soon.

Here is a video of me practising mixing and scratching making that classic “DJ sound”

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Season 3 swimming was far different from anything I expected it to be, due to COVID 19, Singapore entered a circuit breaker period. Initially, aside from school being closed, we were still able to train in public swimming pools so my friends and I would meet up and smash out a few sessions. But then things got more serious, Singapore started closing down public pools. I thought this would be fine as I would be able to train in my condo pool yet they closed those down as well. So as of now, for the past 6 weeks, I have been training every day, top and tailing my days with land workouts, cycling and running. It’s difficult but I don’t think I’m burning nearly as many calories as I was before the circuit breaker but at least I keeping the gears turning.

I was a bit disappointed this year because I had qualified for British nationals and was extremely keen to participate. In addition to this many swim meets were cancelled, this is a very important time as this time of year is usually when we post our best times and I wanted to send something impressive off to the universities that I’m looking at.

In season three they also hosted a remote sports awards video, I was awarded MVP and athletes choice award, it felt extremely pleased when I heard this and it’s nice to know that all of my hard work is paying off in some way, shape or form.

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