Activity: CultuRama China #2

The Learning Outcomes (LO’s) that I hope to achieve by participating in this activity are collaborative skills and commitment & perseverance (LO4 and LO5). So far, it has been easy to commit to coming to each session of CultuRama. I really enjoyed the dance and the people involved, which made it far easier. Additionally, while I thought my increased academic load would make this more difficult for me, it actually almost made it easier for me as I was able to use these rehearsal times as a well-needed break to de-stress. Additionally, everyone in the dance was really friendly and warm which made collaborating far easier for me.

The dances that we’ve learned so far have been really entertaining to do, and I thought it looked really nice. It was also a really nice experience to be able to understand the lyrics, as I learn Chinese in school.

I am really looking forward to the final performance.

 

Activity: CultuRama China #1

The Learning Outcomes (LO’s) that I hope to achieve by participating in this activity are collaborative skills and commitment & perseverance (LO4 and LO5). Ensuring my collaborative skills are up to par is essential for the overall success of the dance, as I will be on stage with over a dozen other people. I have previously done CultuRama, and it wasn’t too difficult to commit to. However, I now have greater academic commitments to meet so I want to make it a goal to commit.

This will be the third and final year that I have participated in CultuRama, so I am really excited to make this one great. The CultuRama theme this year was to celebrate our school’s 50 years, and to show unity amongst and within cultures. I was debating which country’s dance to audition for – Eswatini, Japan, China. I ultimately decided to audition for China’s dance as I felt it was both the most aesthetically pleasing to me, and also as I study Chinese as a second language, and thought it was a unique way to further immersive myself in the culture.

As part of committing to a CultuRama dance, we have to show up to weekly rehearsal sessions alongside any additional sessions that are required/that the dance leaders organize. This will be a way in which I can demonstrate and improve upon my commitment and perseverance. Through other experiences with CultuRama, I have begun to find it easier and easier to collaborate well with many new people. However, I definitely still have plenty of room to improve. Hopefully, it will be a challenge that I can rise up to and learn from.

CAS Project: Reflection and Demonstration

After completing the CAS project, I feel proud of myself. I had learnt a completely new skill and developed it to create an impactful website. I’m really glad that I decided to do the planning and drafting before beginning the website as it gave me a much clearer vision for what to do regarding the design of the website.

My service chair had let me know that more people had signed up in the subsequent season. This lead me to believe that my website had supported the growth of the service (although obviously not all growth can be attributed to the creation of the website. In order to continue this success though, we ensured that all future communications officers will be able to access the website so they could continue updating it with progress reports and new information.

The increase in the number of students joining the service made me feel really good about the future my of schools’ relationship with MINDS, as previous years had seen dwindling numbers. Another part of the website which I felt could make an impact was the section where we described what our service did (which can be seen in the first screenshot). We described what MINDS aimed to do, and how we supported them in achieving their mission goals. I also added in a box to “Learn More” about AMK MINDS by linking it to the actual website if a student felt as if they wanted to do further learning about the intellectually disabled in Singapore.

Attached below are screenshots of some of the websites (note that all names/emails were not included).

CAS Project: Action!

Given that I am not a particularly tech-savvy person, I knew that creating this website was most certainly going to prove difficult for me. However, it was definitely an exciting opportunity to improve my skills and create something useful and impactful. I carefully considered the information I had heard from members of my local service and crafted them into paragraphs or phrases to make my creation of the website easier. Doing so would allow me to be able to just copy and paste in the completed work after I had done all the formatting on the website.

Despite attending the seminar to learn how to better create a website, I still really struggled with doing so. I found that each time I had even just been successful in creating what I wanted, it wouldn’t be visually appealing enough. However, I persevered through these challenges. I think the most frustrating setback for me was when I had spent around two hours working on the website, but forgot to save my work and my laptop crashed. It was really difficult to get back to work after that, as I felt so demotivated and frustrated by myself. It took me a couple of weeks to finally get back into the groove, and I felt like I had really begun to make progress soon after this.

Another setback that I faced during this progress was feeling as if there was not enough information being provided on the website. This caused me to move back and forth between the planning process and the creating process, which was a rather inefficient use of my time.

Despite facing setbacks and personal struggles with the creation of the website, I completed to a standard that I am quite proud of, and that others in my service approved of.

CAS Project: Investigation and Preparation

As I have previously participated in AMK MINDS, I felt prepared to be part of a leadership role this year. I was elected as Communications Officer for the service. One of the roles of being Communications Officer is to design and create a website for our service. I, alongside other Communication Officers, attended a seminar hosted by our Service Executives in order to learn how to create our website. Through this presentation, we learnt about what useful information should be provided on our website, and how to present it in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Through this, I was able to investigate what exactly made a service website useful, and impactful.

Being a communications officer is essential to any effective service, as it is our responsibility to quickly and accurately relay information from the service to others, and from others to the service. My project involved relaying information about our service to others, in order to increase both awareness and participation.

After discussing with the Chair of the service, we agreed upon a good time where we could all collectively collate ideas for what should go on the website. As a communications officer, it is my job to communicate the actions and intentions of my service group, not just myself, making this essential to the process of preparing. We spent a session drafting out different ‘tabs’ for the website, and then potential information that we could include under this. Sections describing what we actually do in our sessions were especially important to have group input on.

Attached here is a photograph of our draft document for information to include on the website.

Activity: Pre-Season Football #1

#LO1 #LO5
I joined pre-season football as I love playing football, and this is an opportunity to continue playing. I have played football for quite a while now, and am able to set clear goals for myself. I am setting LO1 and LO5 as my goals. I would like to increase the accuracy of my shots in football. I am already able to shoot with a lot of power, but the accuracy is often what lets me down in terms of scoring goals and/or effectively passing. Working towards this goal will also help me to improve the way I collaboratively work with others.

Activity: Pre-Season Softball #1

#LO2 #LO5

I joined pre-season softball as I anticipate that I will also be doing in-season softball. As I have played softball before, I would like to set LO2 and LO5 as my goals as I feel like that is what will give me the most progression in the sport. While softball isn’t my favourite sport, I do play with friends and so that makes the overall experience more enjoyable. Meeting the collaboration aspect of my goal is easier as I am playing with friends.

Service: Peer Mentorship #1

#LO2 #LO3

Peer mentorship is a new program at my school where grade 11s aim to support grade 9s in their IGCSE learning. Each peer mentor signs up for whichever program they feel confident in teaching (I chose Biology, English and History). The two learning outcomes I have chosen are: demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process; demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.

A challenge I anticipate is to teach the grade 9s study and note-taking skills. While I am confident in my ability to teach them the information, my own personal weakness is my study schedule and my notes. Hence, this will be a good opportunity to develop my skills alongside theirs. Another challenge will be that each student will have their own individual issues that I will need to adapt to.

I will definitely have to use the first few sessions of this to plan my teaching resources and decide upon the method I want to use to teach my mentees.

Activity: Football #2

#LO1 #LO4 #LO5

I set two LO goals for me; LO1 and LO5. As mentioned before, finding my strengths and weaknesses was quite simple. I set two goals for myself this season: adapt to new teammates + playing styles, and to improve my overall fitness. Due to COVID restrictions, meeting the first goal was quite difficult. This is due to us needing to play in groups of 5, which would have to stay the same for a minimum of two weeks. Hence, playing with different people was something I wouldn’t be able to do. Additionally, the lack of matches meant we only really had skills-based training, which made meeting the second part of my goal more difficult. However, on a more positive note, I definitely did improve my overall fitness. I ended up going to the gym a couple of times per week, alongside regular training sessions. This helped to both improve my skills and my base fitness.

Additionally, I consistently attended training sessions despite sometimes not wanting to. Getting back to school after the summer break meant the sudden influx of work made me more tired, and hence reduced my want to attend training sessions. However, I persevered through this and attended as many training sessions as possible.

I thoroughly enjoy football, and hope to continue this in the pre-season of football.

Service: VOWS #1

#LO3 #LO6 #LO7

VOWS (Voices Of Women in Solidarity) is a group started by two students at my school. VOWS initially started off as an Instagram page but has since developed into a focus group at my school. VOWS works as an initiative to raise awareness around gender-based violence and sexual assault/harassment. I chose to participate in this group as these are topics that I am both aware of, and passionate about.

As this is a new focus group at the school, much of the beginning of the service will be based on planning the direction that VOWS will be taking. Given that this is currently a relatively small group, I am able to effectively discuss potential ideas and plans for the service. We will decide upon the direction we take the service as a group.

This links into the Learning Outcome of considering the ethics of our choices and actions. Given that the focus of our service is an especially sensitive topic, we will need to show an awareness of the many issues surrounding gender-based violence. All decisions that are made in this service must be made with an explicit emphasis upon considering the ethical implications.

Finally, as a focus group, we will take case studies both globally and locally to learn more about gender-based violence as a means of effectively raising awareness around the topic. Sexual harassment and assault are issues that take place everywhere, although these issues may be more prevalent in certain places.