I initially decided to choose physics as it is my favorite subject and it amazes to what extent everything can be explained. With this in mind, I narrowed it down into the mechanics of wheels and seeing how to improve sustainability. Which led to the question, how can the sustainability of wheels of cars be improved? I was concerned that it was too broad so after discussing with my supervisor, I had narrowed it down into 3 different aspects, how could I improve, recycle or replace wheels rather than focusing on the topic as a whole. This helped me come up with an idea to explore the effects of induction braking if we can ever replace wheels. Something that helped me along when doing research, is that I found an environmental agency that had already done experiments with energy efficiency on varying wheel sizes, which aided my research.
Service reflection 3
Here is a video of Alex and I interviewing each other about learning outcome 6.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yRK9YhFaAk&feature=youtu.be
Service reflection 2
This image is showing my confidence levels over time since the start of the service, it has helped to show my perseverance in being able to continue doing the service and help build up my confidence in working with people who have intellectual disabilities. Also working with other people during the activity has helped improve my confidence as it allowed me to express myself better.
After visiting the Minds care centre for the first time, I had a bit of a drop in confidence as the next time we were going to see our service partners, it was going to be the first time we were going to have a session that we planned ourselves. This brings me to learning outcome 3, where we had to initiate and plan a CAS experience. Planning the first session was nerve-wracking as it the first time I had to plan something for people with intellectual disabilities as I didn’t know what activities they would enjoy and engage with and what they wouldn’t. After the first session, my confidence had a bit of a fall as some of the activities that we had planned to do didn’t work out to great, seeing as the clients didn’t engage too well with them, therefore, we were forced to reflect on the session and see what sort of activities they would enjoy. It turned out simple games or activities worked best as they were the ones our clients enjoyed most so after the second session, my confidence had started to rise again because the new activities that we planned were a lot more engaging and the clients were interacting a lot more with the activities.
Piano
This is an example of me demonstrating learning outcomes 1 and 4. I am not a very confident person so performing in front of an audience of people, no matter how big, is always nerve-racking for me and I always get very freaked out, so with this piano recital, I was very nervous to make mistakes, even in front of my own parents. However, I feel after performing, the fear has slightly diminished as I realized, no one was there to judge me and it helped me become more confident. This piano recital has made me more committed because of the amount of practise I needed for certain parts of the songs, even though I messed up a part, I had to put a lot of practise into it. Some parts of the song I struggled with came out quite nicely because, at lunchtime, I had to come in and practice, but I feel in the end, it paid off quite nicely.
Video
https://www.facebook.com/qyyang2004/videos/10217538113468711/?t=7
服务义工的回报
在高中的阶段，学生有要求餐酒创造，行动与服务的计划。这个计划的目的是希望学生收纳柜通过社会实践去体验生活。我们学校要求学生做服务义工，除了让学生长大对社会游泳以外，还为了拿到IB文凭。学校利用学生的空闲来安排学生去做服务义工，所以我每天星期一，下学后会去conference room 1，跟着脑残疾人一起跳舞和做活动。对我来说这个机会来跟住脑残疾人跳舞，我遇到了很多困难，因为我跟着他们在一起，感觉非常不舒服，不知道怎样跟着他们沟通。跟着他们一起跳舞时，我遇到了很多困难因为大部分时候，不但脑残疾人很难跟他们一起沟通，所以我们不知道他们想说什么，而且我觉得我跳舞的时候有点尴尬。但是，我们一直做了的时候，我们就找到了办法来解决这些问题，我们常常会跟他们的关爱人一起沟通，学一学怎样跟他们沟通，还有我跟学生花更多时间，跳舞不会太尴尬因为我们学生的一组已经会很熟悉了。我第一次做服务室，我的态度比较烦恼，我觉得跟着他们一起跳舞就是浪费我的时间但是，久而久之我开始看到做这个服务让我得到很大的收获。
做服务义工是，我收到了很大的收获。因为，跟着脑残疾人在一起，我们应该要爱心和耐心跟着他们在一起因为他们大部分是，不懂社会规范。但是，我们看到他们跟着我们，开始沟通是，我们都感觉到成就感，因为看起来我们又进步了。服务义工让我学会与人相处，丰富了生活经验，加深了对社会的认识。初期之外，参加服务可以培养在我的组织能力级领导能力，也有助于增强自信心。我鼓励大家通过多做义工来了解社会，感恩回报社会，当作对社会游泳的人。
First FOA Reflection
For this FOA, I didn’t do as well as I wanted, I felt that I missed some of the important language aspects of my topic which was swimming, I feel this was because there was hardly any content on the language making it hard for me to find things to talk about. My presentation was a bit weird as I feel that I didn’t have enough structure for my analysis such as a topic sentence, explanation, and link. I did some good close analysis on certain texts of my topic but overall I missed the main gist of what we were supposed to accomplish. Next time I will try to find a better topic and spend more time structuring my work.
Dragons Swimming
I have been doing swimming for over 10 years now and I have a pretty accurate idea of where I am, what I need to improve on and where I am good at. I am a distance swimmer meaning I swim the events like 400, 800, 1500 freestyle and this would be considered as one of my strengths as they are my strongest events. Something that I know I need to is my breaststroke, I can barely swim it at speed because I rarely practise it but from now on I’m trying to get better at it by doing it more in training sessions and also doing exercises to make my hips more flexible. I know that I also need to work on my sprinting abilities as I find sprinting hard due to the fact that I’m too used to swimming distance events so to improve this, I will be doing more gym sessions to improve my strengths and power to swim faster. I am committed to swimming as I have had to give up most of the other sports that I wanted to pursue just to purse swimming competitively, I swim 9 sessions a week and participate in 2 land training sessions a week bringing my swimming hours up to over 20 a week.
Chinese Chat first reflection
As this is a returning activity for me, I have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Last year, something I found difficult last year was getting the kids to be engaged with the activities I provided so this year I feel that I should make the activities more fun and find more ways to get the kids to pay attention. This has helped me developed perseverance as kids would be kids meaning that they would do anything to get off topic and I had to deal with it in ways that wouldn’t be bad while not getting too angry at them. Something that I feel I can do well is making good lesson plans so that the students can improve their Chinese over the activity. I feel that I also connect with the students really well as I understand what they need to improve on and what they enjoy doing, this helps me make my good lesson plans.
MINDS Tampines dance and fitness fun
This is my first CAS reflection on my service, MINDS Tampines dance and fitness fun. We had just visited our partners and I wanted to talk about my first experiences. When we went down to the centre, I was a bit nervous as I’m not too comfortable with people who have intellectual disabilities so I had to put on my nicest face and try and figure out what’s the best way to behave around them. I also find making a fool of myself to a bit hard, so for dancing with our clients, I am a bit nervous. Something that may make up for my weaknesses is my collaboration skills as I am comfortable with working with most people. At the centre, we went through some do’s and don’ts, this helped me considered the ethics of my actions because not only were the clients less privileged then we are, they also were different to us. At the centre, we weren’t allowed to take photos of our clients, this was because taking photos of them may give off the wrong image of the type of people they are.
One goal that I have is to be more confident and just not care what other people think, this will help me enjoy myself more during the service which will make my experience and my client’s experience even better.
After the first session, this brought some global awareness of issues with disabilities in the world. Seeing as Singapore, a highly developed country, it still didn’t have sufficient space for people with intellectual disabilities to be free or have access to facilities they require to help facilitate growth and development. This forced me to make responsible decisions about my way to not only interact with my service clients but also to interact with my current surrounding and be more grateful to what I have and what facilities I have access to
PSE response
What I’ve learnt and how might this relate to me?
During this block of PSE, I have learnt a lot not only about my personal identity but also about my emotional intelligence. I’ve learnt that there are in fact ideal personality types and in class, we manage to come up with a list of them, Conscientiousness, Adjustment, Ambiguity/Acceptance, Curiosity, Risk, Approach, Competitiveness. I identify with a few of them, for example, conscientiousness, Acceptance, Curiosity and competitiveness. I feel that I could do better at Adjustment and getting to fit in better with new things and risk, such as trying new things and not being afraid to change. In PSE, we spent a lot of time talking about emotional intelligence and how that actually affects our future more than we might think. In some cases, people with who have lower IQ than others are more likely to be accepted into a university, or a job because they have a higher emotional intelligence.
This relates to me as I can now use my knowledge and try to improve my emotional intelligence as not only is it better for me in the future, it is also better for me now because it affects the people around me. I feel like knowing about my personal identity has helped me rationalise any decision I make and lets me know my influences behind the thought process I have whenever I try to do something. Using this knowledge, I know that I can make my experience at school even better because knowing about this impacts the way I look at things and causes me to think more about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.