It’s a hard time for everyone and the best that we could do to help stop the spreading of COVID-19 is to stay at home.
School still takes place as usual with online classes yet, I have a lot of free time after school gets done in the afternoon so I thought to myself, why not do some CAS! Some of the activities don’t directly relate to CAS but this post will give you an insight to how I’m dealing with the situation and making the most out of it.
- Unfortunately I’ve lost the opportunity to take private music lessons because we’re under lockdown but I thought of learning to play a couple of pieces on my own. Coldplay is a band that I love, why not learn to play some of their songs on the piano? It hasn’t been that long but I’ve already learnt to play five of their songs namely: Sky Full Of Stars, Everglow, Clocks, Scientist and O Fly On. I’ve not forgotten to practice the music that I’ve been learning with my music teacher.
- My final exams were cancelled by the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) due to the virus so I thought that this would be a good time for me to start a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in a subject area that I enjoy, geography. It has been a little hard to make up time for the assignments along with school work but I made a schedule for it and doing the work according to it has helped me to be on top of things.
MOOC course
Source: edx.org
- I have family in the Netherlands and my plan is to hopefully start college there so I decided to learn a bit of Dutch. It has been challenging, specially the pronunciation but I decided to do it. I’ve only completed five classes so far and I hope it goes well.
- I used to go to the school gym four days a week because my goal was to improve my endurance but now since I’m at home and no one is allowed to step out of their house, I’ve been struggling a lot because most activities to develop endurance require equipment or a lot of space and I don’t have either. I used to be able to do the splits until a couple of years ago when I stopped doing it but I’ve been doing some stretching and flexibility exercises which will help me to go back to doing it.
Stretching exercises Photo credits : Shihan Samarasinghe (mom)
All of these have been keeping me very busy and they have challenged me to grow in different ways and it makes me happy to see how I’m making use of this time but of course, my heart goes out to all the people who are going through a hard time especially the special forces and the medical staff who work day and night to keep us all safe.