Learning Outcome 02 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

Due to the Covid-19 virus, our school and the Singaporean government did no longer allow us to participate in activities outside of school. Mostly it affected our service since we were no longer able to visit and engage without participants at the Down Syndrome Association.
However, we were able to support the DSA on other grounds. On the 21st of March was the annual World Down Syndrome Day. In order to bring this celebration into the school, we prepared an educational slideshow for primary, middle and high school as well as quizzes to actively engage the students in the learning process. The biggest initiative for the World Down Syndrome day was to get everyone to wear colourful mismatched socks in order to show their support, through posters throughout school and other information we managed to reach many students who actually participated in this initiative.

Reflecting on the whole process of establishing the school Internal World Down Syndrome Day was definitely the hard circumstances in regards to contacting our service partners. Although we were able to reach them via Email, discussion and decisions took a long time to reach back and forth. It would have been an amazing experience to plan this project together with our service partners as well as participants since they know best how they want to be represented and supported.
Due to these circumstances, we were mostly working on our own. We met a few times a week to discuss our progress, personally I was in charge of the quizzes whilst others worked on the slideshows and posters. However, since I am the chair of the service I was the person actively in contact with our service partners as well as our service department. I’ve written back and forth with the head of primary, middle and high school as well as individual head of grades in order to get this meaningful project approved, luckily everybody supported our initiative.
Working together with the students in my service was definitely a new experience, we were all motivated by the same objective and even with the circumstances of the Covid-19 virus, we were able to establish a programme aligning with our service partners as well as our crucial participants, however, before we could actually celebrate the day our school got closed. We will keep the established resources for the following G11 as incentives.