This miniature blog post is the second in my CAS series called Mini Blogs. In this little series, I will write some small blogs about CAS-related activities that I have completed, focusing mainly on only one learning outcome. The other learning outcomes related to each blog post will be briefly talked about at the end, with a short sentence about how that learning outcome was addressed with each activity.
LO3 Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience Students can articulate the stages from conceiving an idea to executing a plan for a CAS experience or series of CAS experiences. This may be accomplished in collaboration with other participants. Students may show their knowledge and awareness by building on a previous experience, or by launching a new idea or process.
School has recently just opened up to all grade levels after a long time. This was very exciting for all of us, and after some discussion, the SGA agreed that this would be a perfect time for a “Welcome Back” Spirit Week! Then, Ben and I started to brainstorm some different ideas for the spirit week. When talking with the rest of the EXCO, and SGA, we had been discussing how UN day (a very celebrated day at our school) had been cancelled earlier, due to COVID, so we definitely wanted to incorporate a “UN Day” in our spirit week. Then, many other ideas for the other days were thrown around – twin day, jersey day, silly hat/socks day, PJ day, mismatch day, “why is this in my closet day”, etc. After a long time debating the pros and cons of each of the days, Ben, Andrew and I finally came up with a solid list of days that everyone was happy with. This all was the “conserving the idea” stage of our planning.
Then, we made a poster (above), to advertise to the school, and proposed our idea to Ms. McQuillan and Ms. Clover (who both liked it!). This was the begging of the “executing the plan” stage, which was done through collaboration with the rest of the SGA team, but mainly with Ben.
This whole process of planning and organizing spirit weeks was very familiar for me, as I had experience in this field last year. This spirit week was keeping up with the OSC tradition and building on the previous experiences of the spirit weeks. Here are a couple of photos of people participating on different days!
These photos are from twin day! (Sheruni and I were clearly not twins with each other.. I was twinning with my Dad – who works at the school, and Sheruni was twinning with our friend Ritheek. But, we thought it would still be fun to take some photos!)
These photos are from silly socks day, which Saesha put together!
Other Learning Outcomes (Shortened):
LO2 Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process A new challenge may be an unfamiliar experience or an extension of an existing one. The newly acquired or developed skills may be shown through experiences that the student has not previously undertaken or through increased expertise in an established area. – It was a huge challenge for us to decide which days to include in our spirit week. We had so many new and interesting ideas, such as Asian-American Visibility day (to support the recent attacks in America), Trans-Visibility day (which was originally on the week we planned to do spirit week), and Gender-Bend day (where you dress up out of your stereotypical gender binary). However, we had to really think about doing these spirit days, and we wanted to be careful to not offend anyone, by having their group not included in the celebration. We realized that this would be counteractive to trying to celebrate everyone, so we decided to keep it light-hearted. However, this decision was really challenging. This experience and discussion were not something I had previously come across.
LO5 Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively Students are able to identify, demonstrate and critically discuss the benefits and challenges of collaboration gained through CAS experiences. – As spirit coordinators, Ben and I communicated and cooperated for writing notification emails to the school, and asking for permission to do the spirit week. It is so much easier to have another person working with me for the role of Spirit Coordinator, as there is someone to bounce ideas off of and to also help with the workload. it was challenging to collaborate with the whole SGA to come up with only 5 days as everyone had so many and such good ideas.