OSC’s Room To Read 2018 – 2019

Background Information:
OSC’s Room to Read is a service where our goal is to create a well-resourced reading place for the community. We help local communities who don’t have the facilities or a place where they can read and educate themselves. Last year, 2017-2018, for our service, Milo, Ms. Lockwood and I had multiple meetings regarding the upcoming service. We also focused on all of the students joining  and how we could work together as a group in order to help the students in the Vidya Wardeyna School. Our goal for the semester and as a new service was to create a well-resourced reading place for the community. We wanted to create a proper reading space for the local community where it was needed, support to set up this reading space and help them maintain the reading room as well. After students joined our service, we had started working on the primary library. At the end of last school year, we had accomplished our goal, to complete the Primary Library. We are there as a facilitator to support them in the beginning and teach them how to use and take care of their library.

Investigation:
This year we have a new student leader, Sanjana. New students joined our service and we are a group of young students filled with ideas and decisions to make. We have visited the Vidya Wardeyna School’s secondary library this year to identify the issues and the areas that we can improve on. We have started to have discussions on what we can improve and how we can do that. We have minor goals alongside our main aim such as creating a logo for our service and working on an online bookstore to sell our extra books from book drives. We will keep investigating throughout this year as create new ideas and as we run into various obstacles along the way.

Preparation for this year:
We want to complete the secondary library this year and there is a lot to work on. We are brainstorming fundraising ideas to increase our budget and developing possible designs for the secondary library.

Together we have designed some logo ideas, fundraising ideas and posters for future use:

Along the process, we will be improving our communication, collaborating and reflecting skills.

ATL’s (Approaches to Learning) :

• Communication
  We are communicating in our group and breaking language barriers between the Vidya Wardeyna School during the process. As leaders, the communication between Sanjana and I is very strong, we have an online group with Ms. Lockwood in order to have discussions in relation to our service.
• Collaboration
  The collaboration in our service group is a very important part to achieve our goals. We take this a very key part of the learning and working together as a group. We encourage everybody to participate in group discussions and idea developing conversations. Since we have 12 students in total, we often get into 2 groups to efficiently use our time and have discussions within the groups. Our collaboration is made up of us communicating individually to other people. Therefore, when we are collaborating, we are building up of our communication skills as well. Towards the end of the session, we come back together (if we were in groups) and further share and draw conclusions from the discussion as a whole which eventually leads us to reflection.
• Reflection
  We reflect almost every service session either throughout the session or at the end. We learn from our mistakes and make better decisions which is part of reflecting. We reflect best as a group because everybody is there to evaluate ideas and discussions we have. We also reflect during the active sessions where we have to physically work on the library.

Action and Reflection:
Reflection is an on going process because we reflect on what we do at the end of every service session. We evaluate our ideas and designs and after implementing them we identify if it reached the goal associated with the plan.  We will implement more of our ideas in the future this school year.