Increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth: Creativity and Service

Around May it was announced that towards the end of the year there was to be a couple of days to celebrate the arts. We were given the opportunity to come forward and volunteer to put on arts related workshops for the younger students. I volunteered along with a friend to put on a 3-hour workshop. First we had to research to work out what we were going to offer to the students. I sat down with Ms. Caroline to discuss a couple of ideas I had for my workshop and she advised me to pick something easier as she wanted me to teach the Kindergarten. I was quite apprehensive at teaching a very young age group especially as I didn’t know them or really their abilities. I spoke with my partner and we put together a “My Family and Me” themed workshop. First we were going to introduce ourselves and then we wanted to set about asking the kids about how to draw people and the different characteristics and components that they needed to include. I am not particularly artistically talented by I really did enjoy putting together the workshop as it challenged what I normally plan. I had never done anything like it. After introducing drawing people, we wanted to get the kids to draw their families and then eventually we would get them to tell us what components go in a house and ask them to draw their home. We thought it was probably quite a ambitious plan as it would be difficult to get the kids to go into a large amount of detail. As a precaution we prepared coloring worksheets to keep the kids interested. We wrote down our plan for the two-day arts fest, then sought out the equipment we needed. On the morning of the first arts fest day we were both very nervous. I am a fairly confident public speaker in front of my peers and teachers but teaching and talking to much younger kids was unchartered territory for me. We played some icebreaker games to get to know the kids and I made it my goal to remember as many children’s names as possible. The plan was a success, we had some teething problems at first as some children didn’t know what to draw and some finished really quickly but after a while we both developed a skill of coaxing the children to add more detail and use more color. It was really nice to be involved in teaching the younger student especially since they were very interested and looked up to us. I enjoyed being creative and coming up with ways to keep the kids interested like singing songs and playing games. After three rotational classes over the two days we got better and better at teaching the workshop and I think its safe to say it was a success.

Planned and Initiated Activities: Action, Creativity and Service

The concluding task of our sports leaders course was to plan, prepare and execute a sports day. We were divided into groups negotiated between groups over who would run what sports day. The options were the kindergarten to 2^nd grade sports day, the 3^rd grade to 4^th grade sports day or the 5^th grade to 7^thgrade sports day. Personally I favoured planning the 3^rd to 4^th grade sports day as I thought it would be the easiest to run due to the very close ages of the children. I felt like the older the child the more competitive and therefore the more difficult to run. However many of my group wanted to run the 5^th to 7^th grade sports day and so we went with that age group instead.  We were given a dead line in June, only the week after our exams and I was worried that might lead us to put off planning until last minute. Luckily we remedied this by trying to get all the work done as soon as possible so we could focus on our exam preparation. It was really nice to work in a group, as I don’t really get the opportunity to work in a group at school any more. My group were very friendly and we didn’t have many problems with dividing the workload easily, everyone wanted to pitch in.  At first the task itself was rather daunting how were we going to plan the day, organize the teams, keep the day to the plan? The questions were endless. My job was to organize the teams into house teams equally both age and gender wise which at first I thought wouldn’t be too difficult. It ended up taking much longer than I had anticipated and I had to consult one of the PE teachers, Ms. Ruez to confirm that there weren’t any major problems with the divisions I had made. She advised me to move a couple of people around to make the houses better balanced and then I set to work dividing up the houses into teams. Once I had done that I came back into the group to discuss the games to play. We had a quite lengthy discussion over each of the games but we all took it in terms, voted on which games to play and created a sound plan of the day. I was very proud that we managed not to have any arguments and get the job done. Some problems we encountered while drawing up the playing rota was trying to make sure no team played another twice. In the end we had to settle with a rota were everyone play everyone twice. Once we had done all the planning for the day we handed the portfolio into our sports leaders supervisor, Mrs Osbourne. On the Friday before the sports day after a long time of not thinking about our plan we had a brief group meeting and organized ourselves into pair to set up and run each game. Kunchok and I choose the obstacle course and on the Monday morning of the sports day we set up and ran the game. The game was fairly smooth with only a few problem regarding scoring and penalties. During games if we felt a team had cheated we ended up adding time penalties to their score to try and deter any bad sportsmanship. It was a long and hard day but in the end I was glad all our planning had worked out and the kids had enjoyed their sports day. I think I learnt a lot about dealing with large groups of kids and how best to tell of and reward the kids.