SAISA Basketball Week 4

This week the main focus was working on different types of offense and defense. As for offense, we have worked on the different movements that each player could do and methods to create spaces which the offense can exploit. As for defense, we have worked on 2-3 zone, 1-3-1 zone, man to man and full court press defense. This week was mainly increasing our types of offense and defense that we could use so that we can play against teams which use many different types of offense and defense. And on Saturday, we had a match against Royal Institute at our OSC gym. The score was 41-50 and we were unable to beat them, however, overall I’m very happy with our performances.

Since it was the second match of this season, I was less nervous compared to last time, but it was still a challenge to face a team whom we don’t know what kind of basketball they play. However, we collaborated together to minimize their performance and maximizing our chance to make the baskets. In the first two quarters, we were just getting used to their basketball, but in the 3rd and the 4th quarter, we performed really well in defense and we were also scoring points by exploiting the open spaces, which is something we have been working on in practices. Although we lost the match, overall our performance was much better than last time

Hopefully next week we will also get to play a game against another school so that we can really learn our strengths and weaknesses, and adjust anything that is needed so that we can play at our best in the SAISA tournament.

Sunflower Project: 2nd semester update 3

The plan for this week’s session was to spend about 20-30 minutes in the IT lab to teach them about the typing fundamentals, but since we were unable to book any of the labs after school, we decided to play cricket today.

This was the first time to play cricket in this service project and although all of were unsure whether this would be successful or not, overall I’m very happy with the way that this proceeded. It was very clear that the children were really enjoying, and of course it was very enjoyable for us to play with them too. Sports is one area where communication plays a key role, and as I have difficulty in communicating with them due to the language barrier it was bit of a challenge that I had to take, but this is all part of the experiential learning and something very meaningful. All of us worked and collaborated together to make this happen, and as it was successful I feel that we have made another method of interacting with them as well as taking a step to a higher level of achievement.

Unexpectedly, the RCCI service project has joined us today to play cricket as well (Rehabilitation Center for the Communication Impaired, the children have communication disorders and other mental problems). As cricket is an integral part of the Sri Lankan culture, it is no surprise that everybody wants to join! It was a great opportunity to demonstrate a unity within a community, which is something of global importance.  Sports is one area where anybody can interact with each other regardless of the background and this lead me to think about some of the ethical implications. Whether some are disabled or not, the essence lies in the fact that there is something very valuable to get out which can be learned from this service project, which will benefit us in the future. We are more than welcome to play cricket with the RCCI children again the next time we play cricket.

RCCI children

Origami: Senba Zuru Update 1

I bought the folding papers a few days back, and now I’m ready to start this Creativity. To start off with, I’ve cut a paper into 4 pieces of the same size (all squares).  I’ve cut 25 papers in total, so now I have 100 papers, which is the number of papers I need for this purpose. From now on, I hope to start folding cranes little by little, and hopefully make 100 cranes by the beginning of March.

SAISA Basketball Week 3

This week we’ve mainly concentrated on the offensive and the defensive flows, so that we get a better idea of how we can play offense and defense. On Friday, we played a match against one of the international school in Colombo. The score was 47-39, and we managed to win our first match. Unfortunately I got injured after playing just a few minutes, so I was on the bench for the rest of the game, but we was a very good opportunity to see where we are at.

It was a challenge for me to play the game because it was the first match of this season. I was nervous and I believe that prevented me from playing at my best quality, and this is something that I need to work on. However, I believe that this will naturally come, as we play more games in the next few weeks. As a team, what we need to work on is specially the defense. Although we were practicing that in the practices, doing the same in a match is a different story, and we realized that we were often not doing what we should have been doing. This is another area for improvement that we need to work towards as a team. 

Overall, this week was a good one in terms of getting the feel of how the matches are like. I hope to improve my skills more, and contribute to the team and play at our best!

Sunflower Project: 2nd semester update 2

This week the children have come (only 6, because apparently the older ones have exams coming up) and we spent time teaching them swimming. Since it has been a while since they have gotten practice last (in the early December), we started with the most fundamental skills, such as sinking in the bottom of the pool, and kicking. We then moved onto revising some of the things we taught them last year, such as swimming by kicking (with the floating boards) and free-style strokes. The good part was that many of them have been able to swim at the level they were swimming last semester. After about 40 minutes of productive teaching time, we played water polo for about 10-15 minutes and ended this week’s session.

It has been quite a while since we taught them last, but our previous experience in this project certainly helped, and we were able to give instructions smoothly. I hope to show a full commitment and perseverance in this activity throughout this semester, as this is the last opportunity for me to be involved in the service activities at OSC.

One of the ethical implications that I’ve taught of is about whether we should be teaching new group of children or not. The essence of this project is to teach children the fundamentals of swimming. The current group of children already have achieved this, and now it’s a matter of expanding the skills by teaching more strokes, but this is something beyond our main aim. I thought about whether it would be more beneficial to teach a new group of children, so that many children can get an opportunity to learn how to swim.

One of the things which I realized that Avin and I need to do, is to give the current 11th graders an opportunity to lead this activity. This is so that they get an idea of how it feels like to plan and initiate the activities, since they’ll be taking over the leadership soon. We will give them more chance to lead this service from now on.

 

SAISA Basketball Week 2

The 2nd week of SAISA basketball training has finished. Just like the first week, we have been mainly concentrating on the fundamental skills through various kinds of training. However, now we spend about 15 minutes to play a small 4 on 4, or sometimes 5 on 5 games to see where we are at, and to apply what we did in the drills in the real game situations.

So far, I have been showing my commitment and perseverance by attending every session and coming to practices on time. We, as a team, are now a lot better in terms of collaboration and communication, which was something that we lacked last week. We hope to improve this throughout the season, as it will certainly help us in the tournament.

As 2 weeks have passed, I now have more awareness regarding my strengths and areas for improvements in basketball. In my opinions, my strengths are skills mostly needed for guards, such as speed, agility, handling, driving and passing. Although my jump shots are relatively good, that’s one of the areas that I need to work on, and also driving layups between the posts is also the area that has a lot of room for improvements. As I’m more aware of my weaknesses, I make an effort to try different methods and hopefully find a way to improve. I hope that these weaknesses will improve as we practice more and more.

Sunflower Project: 2nd semester update 1

This week, we were planning to spend 1 hour training the children swimming, but they were unable to come, and so the schedule has been shifted by 1 week. So the next week will be swimming, and for the session on the week after the next, we will spend time on the IT lab and later play cricket in the field.

Origami: Senba Zuru

Origami is a traditional Japanese art of paper folding. As part of my Creativity, I have decided to do Origami as to pursue my commitment to learning a new form of art. There are many different things that can be folded out of just a piece of paper, such as boats, planes, animals, etc, and for this purpose, I have decided to focus on Senba Zuru, which means thousand origami cranes. It is basically one thousand origami paper cranes held together by strings. An ancient Japanese legend says that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury. Thus I have decided to wish for a successful IB grades. However, due to the limited time available, I have modified the custom to one hundred, instead of one thousand.

As to make this more significant to others, my plan is, at the end of this, create a video showing how to create a paper crane and senba zuru, and upload to Youtube, so that other people can watch and learn how to create it. I hope to be able to have the video uploaded by the end of March.

The goals I’ve set are:

• To undertake the new challenge of creating senba zuru
• To show perseverance and commitment by spending about 30 minutes everyday making cranes
• To develop the skill of origami
• To make hundred senba zuru, which will be put together by a string
• To make a video and upload it to Youtube

Senba zuru

Paper cranes

SAISA Basketball Week 1

This week was the very first week of the SAISA basketball training. There are 4 practices a week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. For this week’s practices, we’ve been mainly concentrating on conditioning as well as to revise some of the fundamentals, such as dribbling, positioning, passing, etc through variety of drills.

As this was the first week, I saw many lack of communication between our members during the practices. Basketball is a team sports that requires a lot of communication, and thus this is an area that we, as a team, needs to work on. I believe that this will naturally improve as we practice more. So far, I have been attending every session, and I hope to keep this up, as one of my goals is to attend every practice throughout the season.

 

Sunflower Project: 2nd Semester

2nd semester of the community service at OSC has started on the 2nd of February. For this session, we gathered as a group in order to make changes/improve what we have been doing last semester. We have been informed that the same children, who came last semester, are coming.

Last semester, we implemented a new activity, that is, teaching the children the fundamentals of computers, mostly typing. However, as we experienced this new activity, we realized that we weren’t doing very well with this, and the children were often bored after a while. Although we used a typing practice software, the children were mostly typing with the index finger and not placing the fingers on the right position on the keyboard. Therefore for this semester, we hope to thoroughly teach them the proper positions so that the children are learning something more meaningful than simply typing without knowing the basics.

For this semester, we have decided to include cricket as well. This is another implementation to expand our project and make this more meaningful to the children as well as to ourselves. This will not only bring more enjoyment for the children, but also to provide them an opportunity to play in a better condition (fields, equipment, etc), as their school have tiny ground and the conditions are not very good. We could also use the money in the CAS account to buy cricket bats and other equipment for them.

The new plan is to have one week where we teach swimming, and for the next week teach computers and play cricket, and we will be alternating this plan. We believe that having variety of activities will allow the children to have more enjoyment and more chance to be exposed to meaningful activities. To start off with, on the 9th of February, we will teach swimming, and on the 16th of February, we will teach computers and later play cricket. We’ll be spending about 20-30 minutes in the lab, and spend the rest of the time (around 30-40 minutes) playing cricket.

My goals for this project are:

• To continue to give an effort to teach the children the swimming skills
• To teach the children more swimming strokes (namely breast stroke)
• To initiate the activity in collaboration with Avin and Ms. Abeyawardene
• To improve the computer sessions compared to last semester
• To provide an opportunity for the children to play cricket in a better environment
• To buy some of the cricket equipment for the children
• To show commitment and perseverance by attending every session