LO 2 Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

LO 7 Recognise and consider the ethics of choices and actions

Through approximately half a year of being in this service, it has been easy to recognise and understand challenges that we have faced in planning activities and managing our time, especially. We have been able to develop quite a few new skills through the challenges we have faced, in my opinion. For example, communication between us, especially for the chairs of the service, was improved after we found that we were a bit underprepared for certain sessions and could have used some better planning and prior information before going to the center. In another instance, there was an improvement in our skills of creativity and the confidence of actually putting up ideas to the rest of the group, as well as taking the incentive to create new plans for activities and to be open to criticism from the rest of the group members. We found this was a skill that arose as we grappled with the threat of having too little variety in our sessions, thus losing the interest of the elderly at the centre.

A big lesson that we learned towards the end of the CNY break, was that our actions have consequences; not to interpret this in a bad way, but we realised that especially with the elders we need to be more aware and informative about certain components of their culture that we may not be so familiar with. For example, during our CNY activity of creating cut out lanterns and colouring them, we did not realise that the colour white symbolised something negative in their culture and had to be informed by one of the centre workers. We realised that we need to be culturally ethical and culturally aware the next time that we do get the chance to visit the centre, because there may be parts of the culture we are visiting that we may not understand or may not be familiar with. Therefore, it is always useful to gain some prior knowledge and some awareness before we do try to plan any activities with the elderly from here on out.