One of the ice-breaker activities during the first session (photograph by Ms. Lockwood)

Two sessions of doing service physically

With the start of on-campus Afterschool activities, I was able to apply to a wide variety of activities – including Room To Read as my service choice. RtR was my first choice for service, as I had wanted to be able to continue it from last year and fulfill our service missions as much as we could. We had gained quite a few new faces for RtR this year, and I believe that the level of engagement within our group was quite high.

For the first session we primarily just talked about what our service goals were and what upcoming endeavors looked like for OSC’s Room To Read. It was during this service session that I was appointed as one of the service leaders for this group – to officially take action sometime during April.

I noticed that there were many new events that were to take place: some of which include a Book Drive and various other sessions with prominent authors in Sri Lanka. I believe that while online service was engaging, attending Room To Read physically was a very different experience – it was infinitely better to engage properly with the people around me and talk without the fear of being muted!

After talking about what events we plan on undertaking, we briefly allocated the tasks of creating posters for these. And during the second RtR session, we were able to work more on this task. Everyone in the group created posters using Canva – either individually or working together in pairs and presented them to Ms. Lockwood. It was great to see this level of engagement from everyone in the room!

This was what predominantly occurred during the second RtR session, and I think that we were able to get very far in this task. Along with Ms. Lockwood, we were able to come up with a set schedule for when these posters promoting our (soon to be revealed) events should be completed and included in the Daily Bulletin. I think that creating a firm schedule really helped to accelerate the speed of work.

In the end, we decided that on our next service meeting (after WWW) we will be critiquing the posters and choosing the best one to be on the Daily Bulletin.

Be on the lookout for OSC Room To Read’s upcoming events!

Learning objectives:

• LO2 – Challenge and skills
  • I believe that throughout service I was able to successfully challenge myself more and refine my skills when working together with the other members in order to fulfill our goals and deadlines.
  • My communication and engagement skills were definitely practiced during these physical service sessions, as there are immensely different from online service.

• LO3 – Taking initiative and planning
  • I believe that this learning outcome was expressed very much during these past two service sessions, in order to satisfy our missions and tasks, time management and scheduling certain activities were very important.
  • Moreover, I plan to keep my CAS updated with developments that we will be making in Room To Read.

• LO4 – Working collaboratively with others
  • This learning outcome was practiced immensely, I talked to many different people during these service sessions – something that would have been much harder through online service