As a part of our Holistic development program offered by our school, for the arts special, I am part of our school band. I play the keyboard/piano/organ for the band and I just love music. In the band, we make our covers of our favourite songs and pieces. The whole band is creative, where we don’t only play songs, but also try to improvise or compose our music. We also get to occasionally perform in school events for which I am always excited and I love playing. I always get chills whenever we play something and it sounds good, the whole experience is just amazing. 

LO1 – Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth

• To properly contribute to the band, I did identify my strengths and weaknesses, my strengths being my ability to play the piano and my creativity. Maybe one of my few weaknesses could be that at the beginning of the year, I had very little knowledge of music theory, which is key for understanding songs from a musical perspective, other than this, another one could be that I didn’t have any experience of playing in a band before this which led to me being underconfident about playing the keyboard. Once I was aware of all my strengths and weaknesses, I quickly reflected upon myself and then started to work on myself. Being with the band every day, I quickly caught up on musical theory, which only developed my skills even more. It’s very important to know our strengths and weaknesses since it gives you more to work on yourself and to improve yourself, which is required to develop yourself in every possible manner, like in this whole experience of being a part of the band, it showed me my weaknesses and then it also helped me overcome them. 

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

• I feel the main challenge for me in the band was my low knowledge in terms of musical knowledge, and another challenge for me was my lack of experience of being a part of a band which also led me to being nervous and underconfident while playing with the band. It was challenging for me because these things kept me from being able to play freely and comfortably in the band, and for the band to function properly, it required me to give my best. I overcame this challenge by spending time with my bandmates and learning a lot of musical knowledge from them. Now that I have undertaken this challenge, I feel amazing and it’s great to be a part of the band, just playing our favourite music every day. Moreover, the skills that I have developed in the process will help me a lot in the future, learning and applying more musical theory has helped me become a lot better and a lot more confident while playing the keyboard, and now whenever I ever play with another band, it’ll be easier for me to collaborate with them. 

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

• For the band, collaboration is key to playing a song properly, everyone needs to be in sync. Working with others is generally easy for me and that’s because I am very open-minded and I have good communication skills. I know the importance of collaboration with others, and that it always makes the task easier. In the band, at first, it was a bit hard to collaborate with all the band members since I didn’t know them properly and we couldn’t connect properly, however, we quickly started collaborating effectively. We all gave creative ideas to each other, tried out everyone’s ideas, played our instruments properly and everything just worked together. This shows the benefits of working collaboratively with everyone, where we can now play any song of our choice with much difficulty, or we are even able to explore our creative ideas with each other. 

I developed the learner profile attributes “Communicator, reflective, Knowledgeable and Open-Minded” during the whole experience of the band. I feel that this experience benefited all of the band members since it was a different and special kind of experience for each of us which gave us a lot of knowledge, and learning, and developed our skills, our creativity. The highlight of the experience for me was whenever we all just jammed together in the music room and whenever we performed at an event. This experience brought me a great sense of accomplishment and I enjoyed it a lot. I learnt a lot of new things from this whole experience and it’ll come into use for me in the future as well.