(The students of Ekamuththu Pre-school. Pic cred: OSC’s Room To Read Website)

Consolidating the work done in Room To Read so far

Thus far, I believe that RTR has come a long way in achieving its goals – we have organized multiple campaigns and other events. I believe that the most successful these days have been the Books N’ Cookies – it’s always been a full house, and we’ve had some very interesting discussions!

Furthermore, we’ve also conducted a stationary and uniform drive for the students of Ekamuththu pre-school, with the help of the OSC community we managed to raise funds in order to provide resources for these students. During our service session today, Ms. Lockwood showed us videos and pictures of these students being handed the resources bought with money we collected for them – this was quite heart-warming.

(Ms. Amalee, principal of Vidyaloka Vidyala School, giving a Books N’ Cookies presentation. Pic cred: Mr. Lockwood)

As for future plans, we are working on the idea of a Karaoke night in order to raise funds for Vidyaloka Vidyalaya School to help with the construction of a school library. This idea is still in the works, and something I’m very excited to carry out! Additionally, we plan on having another literary afternoon.

There’s also the chance of our RTR group visiting the Vidyaloka Vidyala School in person and helping them out. I believe this would be highly beneficial for everyone in the group as none of us have seen the progress of the library construction in person.

Learning outcomes:

• LO3 – Initiative & Planning 
  • I have definitely been able to implement this learning outcome through the last few weeks with Room To Read. With the plans for more events in order to fundraise, my organization and planning skills have been exercised.
  • Moreover, with the plans for the Karaoke Night – quite a large event – these skills have been amplified recently. With the date for this night coming up soon, it’s been constant work toward making sure that we pull off this campaign the best we can.

• LO4 – Working collaboratively with others
  • Our service group is definitely a very collaborative one, not only do we work together in order to carry out our work – we also engage with other schools and students as a way of doing our service work.
  • For instance, collecting donations and packaging them to send to Ekamuththu pre-school required teamwork (especially wrapping the books, which was surprisingly hard!).

• LO6 – Global Engagement
  • Due to the fact that we are a service group interacting with the issue of insufficient school/ literary resource faced by local students, this learning outcome is integrated into our work to a large extent.