As we are approaching the final exams swiftly, it’s time for final CAS reflection. In these two years of CAS I was able to engage in many creativity, activity and service projects and some of these were done at home while some of them were done at school. CAS has helped me to accept challenges and become stronger as a person even during the pandemic.

Creativity

In these 2 years of CAS, I have been able to engage in many creativity activities: these include the DP2 Art Exhibition, cooking, nail arts, sewing, henna etc. Creativity skills tend to be more fun as they need more attention and enthusiasm to engage in these skills. In these two years I was able to improve my cooking skills as I was able to make pizza, cupcakes, waffles and spaghetti. I also shared these with my family. I started with a very basic recipe for waffles and I was able to get good comments from my family. I lack many cooking skills as I’m still a beginner and therefore it took me a while to get more comfortable with the ingredients and cooking skills. As I have to move to a new country in the coming month, it is very important for me to know how to cook everyday meals by myself and CAS gave a great opportunity for me to prepare in advance. Another milestone of the DP, is the Art exhibition as it is one of the main components in the IB DP Art syllabus. I created 7 artworks including paintings, photographs, mend pieces with the themes of nature and depression as I wanted to express how I felt during the lockdowns and isolations.

The DP Art exhibition was an amazing opportunity to exhibit our 2 years of artworks to the community and making these artworks was really fun and relaxing especially during the lockdowns in order to calm our minds. Moreover, as hobbies I enjoyed doing some nail arts and henna during my free times as these activities made me happy as I was doing what I like. I was able to draw henna tattoos on my cousin’s hand and developed my tattoos skills. Sewing is also another very important part of me as I have always wanted to create clothes or garments and do things related to fashion. As my last sewing was about 4 years ago, I decided to improve my sewing skills this year by doing some sewing techniques as an experiment. Although it was quite difficult to recall everything, I was successful in my sewing technique experiment. All these creativity skills helped me to keep balance in my school work and hobbies and they were really fun to do. 

Activity 

As there were many lockdowns, it was quite difficult to do outdoor activities such as going for a walk, running and hiking. However, staying fit and healthy was still possible with the help of regular workouts and doing cardio exercises. As the lockdowns were lifted I was also able to do some more activities such as horse riding, hiking, learning driving skills, badminton and swimming while we were able to travel within the country. During DLP and lockdowns in the beginning of the DP, I had set up some goals for myself in order to stay fit and healthy: these included working out at least 30 minutes everyday in the morning before online school starts. This gave me a fresh start in the morning and gave me a lot of energy to start off with the day. For the first few months I was able to stick up to my goal but when the workload increased I wasn’t able to do workouts everyday. However, I still managed to exercise at least 3-4 times a week. While doing this, when the lockdowns were lifted, I was able to engage in many other outdoor activities as before. I have played badminton and swimming for quite a long time and both of them are my favorite sports. However, I missed them during the lockdown. Therefore, as soon as I got the chance to get out, I went to play badminton with my brother and I also was able to swim as usual for more than 2 hours.

I  also visited the gym for about 2 months until there was another lockdown and I really enjoyed being around the equipment and having a personal instructor to guide me to stay healthy. Last year, I was able to try out some new activities such as horde riding and learning driving skills. Both of these activities were amazing and I had a lot of fun. More importantly, I now know how to ride a horse in a professional way as well as driving a car. These skills are very helpful especially driving skills and I went with my father to practice driving skills everyday in the summer vacation and as a result I’m very close to getting the driver’s licence. Horse riding was very similar to driving a vehicle and the groom helped me to learn how to ride the horse in a very easy way. As a travel lover, hiking is a very important activity to me that I have missed for almost 3 years. I haven’t been able to hike since I moved back to Sri Lanka and I last hiked in Australia almost 3 years ago. I went hiking last year during the winter break with my family and we hiked the Pidurangala Rock in Sigiriya. It wasn’t a very long hike but the path was quite dangerous as some of the rocks weren’t stable and were very slippery. However, it was a very adventurous and fun hike that I will never be able to forget. Although engaging in activities weren’t as easy as creativity skills, they added many fun  experiences and challenges to my life.

Service

I was able to join two service groups in these 2 years of DP. I joined SOS village in DP 1 and joined Hope For Kids in DP2. Both the experiences were really fun and I was able to help kids and make them happy in many ways. SOS village is a service group designed to help the kids learn a new language (English) while helping them improve their English language skills and to teach them swimming skills. I chose SOS village as my first service group because I wanted to be a part of the group to advance SOS villages’ kids’ English skills and make sure that they are well engaged during service through different English learning activities.  However, due to the pandemic they weren’t able to visit the school and the swimming practices have stopped but we still interacted with them with many activities using zoom. We came up with many different activities everyday to help them learn new English words. I joined Hope For Kids in DP2 because I have been wanting to try new service experiences and recognise new members in the community. In the Hope For Kids service group, we address and relieve the impact of cancer on not only the patient but their family also, by implementing a guidance and therapy program for affected mothers at the Maharagama Cancer Hospital.

For my last week of this service group, we planned a fundraising campaign as we organised a cricket match within the community and asked the teacher to volunteer to play. We invited the school community to watch and asked to bring 500 rupees in order to purchase the entrance ticket. We also sold king coconuts and different flavours of ice creams. In the end, we made a thank you card for the cricketers who volunteered to play and we were able to get about 50000 rupees from the match to donate to the Maharagama Cancer Hospital. As I joined this service group, I decided to do my CAS project based on raising cancer awareness. I created a poster in three languages including English, Sinhala and Tamil in order to make everyone understand the content. Therefore, in the poster, I included some numbers about how many people are affected and how many types of cancers there are in order to give a sense to people of the importance of getting medication at the right time. I displayed these in the places where people visit often such as the school, local workplaces and a filling station. During these 2 years, in the service component of CAS, I was able to gather many new experiences such as organising skills, made new friendships, learned how to work as a group by engaging in collaborative activities as a group. Overall, it was really fun to work with those kids and it was even more fun to make them happy and smile. I’m looking forward to participating in more service based activities in the future. 

Learning outcome 1: Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth