Student Voice #2, 28th October 2019

Over the last month, I have been working together with others in order to be able to form different organizations towards the morning assemblies which are held in roughly a monthly basis. This has been quite a hard experience as there are quite a lot of different members and different opinions about the approach towards how to hold the assembly. Fortunately, we were able to agree on having a performance from a school band from our grade to interest our grade, then have the announcements which would inform the students about the coming event. In the next time, we hold an event, hopefully, we will be able to work coherently as we now know better what are the better things to do, and what should be improved for next time we have an assembly.

Special Olympics Badminton #1, 6th September 2018

Today I just finished my first session with the Special Olympics, this was a very useful session as although we didn’t play badminton with the people with disabilities, we did investigate what they do and what we can offer in order to help out the athletes. First of all, we had a lot more understanding of how to act towards them and smaller things in order to help create a bond faster such as their interests and what they like to do. We had a brainstorm with the structure of CAS and what part of CAS we are going to do when doing the special Olympics badminton.

My own personal goals are to get better at badminton and to improve my bonds with the special people. I also want to become more aware and raise awareness in some way, however, my goals still have some risks, this includes having to go out of my comfort zone and try to talk to these special people which I don’t know too well. I think that this CAS has a high need for a lot of commitment as the time of the CAS is at 7 to 9 at night on Thursday, although the time is hard to manage I think that it is still worth doing because it is such a great experience.

The learning outcomes this activity focuses on is was mostly LO 1, LO 4, LO 5 and LO 6. This activity has helped me have better awareness because it has helped me learn more about them and learn more about how I should learn in order to know more about the people that have different abilities. I had also learned that I need to learn more about how to interact with the people that have specialized abilities, as it is hard to know what to say and what not to say. The Special Olympics Badminton had also challenged my commitment because the time which the activity is held is at a late time and the way which I stay motivated in order to keep going is by using my time which I have before the CAS to study and do everything I need to do so by the time I go home I can go rest. In this session of Special Olympics Badminton, all the students had collaborated together and tried to get to learn more about each other, one activity that we had done is that we brainstormed ideas with each other as a group of our own skills and what activities we can do with the sports players, initially it was hard to do because we didn’t feel very comfortable on sharing our own skills and we didn’t really know about each other either. We had overcome our difficulties with each other by doing some icebreakers activities with each other. Finally, this activity has a relationship with the global issues, this is because by playing and learning how to play badminton with these athletes shows equality to those who have special abilities and need some support in order to be able to play, and now that I have learned much more about the athletes I learned more about how they deserve the same or even more amount of care and support to play the sports that they would like.