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

SAISA Basketball

This year, SAISA Boys Basketball is hosted at our school OSC, and I have decided to try out for it. The tournament takes place from the 16th to the 18th of March, and the practices start from the 31st of January.

Before starting the practices, I have set the goals which I hope to be able to achieve by the end of this season:

• To undertake the challenge of trying out for SAISA basketball for the first time
• To increase the awareness of my strength and areas of growth in terms of basketball as well as my behaviors
• To work collaboratively with the team members to perform at our best quality possible
• To show perseverance and commitment by going for EVERY practice
• To develop new/enhance my basketball skills and others, such as leadership qualities
• To undertake the challenge to be the starting member (preferably a point guard) of the team
• To show a good sportsmanship in basketball

Although it is the last semester of IB and the schedules are very tight with various assignments and exams, I hope to achieve a balance between academics and outside activities, and this is one opportunity to do so. Therefore I hope to achieve as many of my goals as possible by the end of this exciting tournament! I will be giving updates regularly and reflect on how I’m going towards achieving the goals.

Sunflower Project Update 8

On the 14th of December, we had the end of semester party with the children. Yariq has funded us with the money to buy chicken basket from the near KFC, and we also got some drinks. It was a good opportunity for us to talk and interact with them outside the swimming pool. We also asked and reflected about how they feel about their improvement and the confidence level in swimming and so on.

We’ve decided to give them the notebooks, which they need for their school. Avin and I ordered those particular notebooks in advance, and we gave them to each children on the 16th of December after school. Education is an issue of global importance, and I feel that we’ve made this activity more meaningful to us as well as the children by doing more than just teaching swimming. Since we have the money for these purposes in our account, we hope to use it for other meaningful purposes in the next semester as well. At the same time, there is an ethical aspect to consider because there are many more children at their school, but only the few that were with us for this semester could get the notebooks. But we hope to help more as new group of children come in future.