There are all kinds of people in the world, some are lucky enough to be normal, and many don’t have the same type of ability or privileges that others have. For this CAS experience, I along with my friend visited “Shilpa School For Special Children” where many special students come daily to learn the basic activities which are necessary for anyone to complete in daily life, just so that they can at least live at peace. My friends and I wanted to visit this school hoping to bring them some joy, some happiness and a lot of fun, we played games with them, and spent a lot of time, talking with them, and understanding their lives. 

LO2: Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process

• For me personally, being comfortable with the children was a challenge at first, because all of them were different, it was out of the normal for me and I didn’t feel comfortable, that was until I realized quickly how they too are humans and how they have to face difficulties in their everyday life, how they have to live their entire life like that. Once I realized this, I was able to empathize with them and then I understood how it is for me to put things into perspective and how in order for me to fulfil the purpose for which I visited that school, I had to be open-minded and comfortable, because at the end of the day, everyone deserves happiness and joy, and that’s what I believe. While facing this challenge, I realized how necessary communication skills are and they are what helped me overcome it. This experience helped me develop my communication skills even more since, when I faced this challenge, I knew that the only way to overcome would be to introduce myself with a smiling face and be open and kind towards towards everyone. This skill that I discovered within me helped me a lot, due to which I could properly connect with all the students present there, which helped me talk to them freely, make them play games and enjoy properly. I felt really happy seeing all those children enjoy themselves, playing and having fun, shaking hands with me and communicating with me. It’s important to be open-minded everywhere and it’s important to have proper communication skills, it’s only because of this I was able to contribute to this experience properly. Having this skill of communication makes me feel good about myself and know that I can use this skill to adapt to any situation. This skill will always be useful to me. 

LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience

• For the visit to the “Shilpa School for Special Children” I organized myself by firstly mentally preparing myself to be sensitive towards all the students present there, to empathize with them, and to be kind and open towards them. Then I also planned for all the different things that we could do with the children, like playing dodgeball with them, then just playing with a football, in a circle passing the ball around and then drawing on chart papers. I think it was difficult planning the activities since we didn’t know which activity would be more fun for them to do, so we had to brainstorm a lot about it. Initiating the activity was also a bit difficult since explaining the activity was a bit hard, but in the end, everything worked out and they all enjoyed the experience. We initiated the activity by using our communication skills and showed them how to do those by ourselves first and then guided them ahead. I have realized that for planning and initiating activities, you first have to think of every possibility of the activity and then go ahead with the plan, you have to brainstorm a lot. Due to these new learnings, I feel that Planning and initiating activities will be a lot easier for me in the future.

LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

• Working with others is generally pretty easy for me since I have great co-operative skills and over here in this experience, I had to work with my friends, whom I already knew and hence we worked with each other pretty easily. We had to work together to handle all the students, we supported each other when we could not handle them properly, we worked together in the planning of the activities and much more. Looking back on this makes me recognize the benefits of working collaboratively. And thats why it’s important to work collaboratively with everyone, so that things become easier for everyone, and everyone helps each other. There was much importance of teamwork in this activity since we all had to handle all the students at once and help each other at times, otherwise, the experience would have been as effective as it was. 

LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance

• I feel that these children didn’t have good facilities for education and care, and that’s a huge issue. The reason behind the same is that everyone deserves good care and quality education, these kids deserve it equally as much as I do. The issue is that not much is being done for them, there are very few schools such as this that would even be willing to do this much as this school did. This is not just a local issue, it is the same everywhere, it’s a global issue that needs to be addressed. This issue is the reason why I volunteered to visit this school in the first place, knowing about these things only contributes more to my personal growth, it inspires me to do more for the community and to contribute more towards the community. Knowing about this issue also kind of tells me about what more I HAVE to do for the community and how there are many problems in the world waiting to be solved, knowing this makes me act against these issues. 

LO7:Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.

• I feel that there could be some ethical issues involved in this experience. Being sensitive to their overall situation is one big issue since the proper way to act with them, to talk with them, to behave with them might just be too complex to understand. We don’t want to make them feel bad, sad, inferior or anything of the sort, hence we had to be very sensitive to overcome this ethical issue. We had to carefully choose what actions to take and what to do, even in the planning of these things, we raised this ethical issue and discussed it. 

I developed the learner profile attributes of being open-minded, communicating, thinker and caring. I feel that this activity was very beneficial towards everyone, for me because it gave me an experience I can never forget, and for the children since they got the enjoy it a lot. This activity made me feel really good, it gave me some satisfaction, that yes, even though their problems can’t be solved, they can still be happy, and for some of them, maybe I can be that reason for happiness, and knowing that makes me feel good. The highlight of this experience for me was seeing how the children smiled, how they enjoyed, and how they were so happy for so little. I have to say that due to this experience, I am going to keep volunteering at such events, in order to help my community and do it for helping others. One of my key learnings from this activity was that no matter how harsh the conditions can be, you don’t have to be sad or hopeless, being happy is the key to everything.