CAS_PROFILE!!!

I am Nikunj Panssari, I am a 16 year old student studying in Fountainhead school, Surat. I was born on 31st January, 2000. From the age of 4 my parents didn’t left me a choice of any video games and was exposed to sports i had also aimed to win each and every type of race, even if it’s running or skating. My parent made me join skating classes so that i can get a motivation towards my interest. Hence i became a very sporty kind of person who can give everything to be best. I liked the speed at which i was moving while skating and tried to be the best and participated in different city competition. I won many medals and made my mom proud. Sometimes i was able to see tears in my mom’s face which made feel nice. Even though i was very sporty i unconsciously build skills in arts. I build a skill in coping real life object and due to that i was able to draw same sketch in the book. It was soon when i left skating and joined soccer as a preferable sport and after than i played many matches in different level and city. Soon i also gave up my sketching and and end up taking dance as my current preference and even dance i represented my school and also danced in different award function. If i looked upon my academics than i was only interested in two subjects which was math and science. And even science was the subject that i end up not taking it. Writing english has always been a struggle for me and due to that i half the time i end up unable to express myself. I am always ready to take up thing as challenge and now i end up taking my career as a challenge. I like adventure and due to that i want to do skydiving and scuba diving which one day i will be doing it.cas

CAS- Essay

CAS is what help me to explore three different components which were creativity action and service. As initially it forced me to explore creativity and service but activity part is what most enjoyed about CAS. Even though the other 2 components was difficult for me to complete but i did it. I loved it when i performed my CAS different components. There are memories which stuck in my mind which were in service when i saw a smile in that child face. In creativity when we made step collaboratively it was a joyful experience.

Cas helped me to coordinate between time and work. There is not only one but i learned multiple thing from CAS which are that Whatever we do we need to commit to thing and always do the work ethical from our side. The most fun part about CAS were activity that i performed like football, dance, gym sessions, etc. this activity motivated me to do more.

CAS has given me memories which won’t be forgotten by me like naggar long trip where we did different adventure and breathtaking experiences. All this activity help me to work on myself by thinking mentally and logically. It help me to grow personally. One major skill that i learned is to work collaborated, teamwork which will help me my whole lifetime. This skill was successful but there were time were it did not work the task was to try your best try to make it work in different activity.

The most tedious and hard learning outcome to achieve was to have a group project as it was hard settle on the same idea as everyone and it requires weeks of planning which was tiring but in the end the commitment that what matters. The end product come hand in hand where we were able to collect that much fund that we could donate stationery to the orphan children.

CAS activity were a pleasant experience for me where i explored different phase of myself and which were awesome.

CAS PLAN

Proposed Activities Description of the activity Components (C/A/S) Duration with start date and end date Goals Learning Outcomes
plantation activity the activity was organised by school, i took an initative to plant trees in vasda forest park Service only on 19th of july to give best service, even do all that i can help in. LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth.
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills. LO4commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
LO6:engagement with issues of global significance
Dance to learn and perfome a dance in the end of the year. Activity only on 26th of july learn new skill and a new art LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
OGIS football tournament play football and win try to win matches Activity 5th september perfom best, have a good sporting spirit LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
LO7:Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
trip to naggar A class winter trip to Naggar, Himachal Pradesh where we took part in various adventure activities. Activity 27th December 2015 to 4th January 2016 To try out each and evry thing and not let go the oppourtinity. LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
LO6:engagement with issues of global significance
gyming to work on your body to make it more fit Activity 1st december to 31st march to improve endurance and increase my strength LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
kabaddi tournament group project where we organized a tournament for student to increase the awarness activity, service and creativity 14th of july to 24th of august increase the awarness about the sport. also to show all gender are equal. LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO3:initiate and plan a CAS experience
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
LO6:engagement with issues of global significance
LO7:Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
teachers day celebration we taught grade 4 student for 2 hours creativity and activity september 5th to teach the kids that wont be taught by there teachers and make the class more joyful. LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
garba fest help to choreograph dance creativity and activity 5ht october to 10th october make the dance more meaningful for the topic and make it more joyful. LO1:Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth
LO2:Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills
LO4:commitment to and perseverance
LO5:Collaboration
LO6:engagement with issues of global significance

Just Dance

 

Dancing has become a part of my life and I have always been passionate about this activity as it helps me to relax and I express myself while doing it. I always wanted to learn dance from professional and learn different forms of dances. However hip-hop is what passionate me. To fulfill my wish our school offered dance classes from professional where we had to attened dance session for twice a week for 3 whole months, where we will learn two forms of dance contemporary and hip-hop.

These dance classes have helped me improve and polish my dancing skills, by making my movements more clear and precise. It has also improved my body posture, increased my body control while dancing and made me more flexible. These dance routines have helped me develop a keen interest to consider this art as a profession or as a part time job in future, as I feel enthusiastic. Along with the other advantages, dance has made me physically more fit, by increasing my stamina, as dancing requires a lot of endurance, especially forms like hip-hop. On the other hand, contemporary helped me maintain my mental strength, as it requires patience and determination. I didn’t like Contemporary because I thought it was a very tedious form. However after practising for hours, I kind of started feeling the dance form and started taking it positively. As I was learning this form for the first time, it  proved to be a very big challenge, because this dance form is quite hard.

“Kalakriti” was an amazing art event organized by our school. This is when we show our practise, hours of hard work, commitment and amount of passion towards dance to our parents. We have to show it all, the efforts we applied like to come school early, skipping meals, etc. To perform the the best as we could we needed synchronization and for that we had to communicate with each other. This is when our communication skills worked alot as i needed to coordinate my steps with other 14 members of the crew. This when my skill paid off and also got better from it’s experience.

Dance has always been a part of my life and this class helped me to make form of presentation more precise.

 

CAS PROJECT

Our CAS project was all about organizing a kabaddi tournament in our school. The whole process was to lengthy and which was became a bit boring but in the when it eventually ended i had good feeling and a sigh of relief. Kabaddi is a indian sport which got famous in past 2 year due to international tournament called PRO KABADDI!!! This was our one of the major influence which lead us to organizing this tournament. So being not so popular sport in our school became our one of the major challenge for our group which were my classmates Anay, Varun and I who needed to face this.

We chipped in our ideas and finalised our project on Kabaddi Tournament. We needed co-ordination in our group as we had to plan a lot for the tournament. We needed to finalise the venue, also needed to advertise, make the teams. We short down the possible venues that we can organize this tournament in. We came up with three options for our safe side. Where our first venue request was rejected which was of assembly and the other option was PE area which was approved by our sports faculty which completed our part of venue.

We simply executed three different advertising strategies, posters, online awareness and the word of mouth. First two strategy were easily applied but when it came to word of mouth all three of us had problem in speaking to unfamiliar audience. To beat the fear we aloted each of us some classes were we had to announce the competition details which was much more difficult than it seems. Finally we listed the participants but when we gathered and cleared out the doubts about the possible injuries and risk during the tournament. Some people took their names back and unregistered. So we atlast end up with 30 contestant our hands.

At this point we needed to start collecting the charged money from the participants. We gave reminders through emails. We had to tackle the problem of collecting money as each student were in different grade and section. It was one of the big challenge to face and by the proactiveness of the participants we were able to collect it on time. From the fund we were giving rewards like best raider defender and the winning prize for the winning team.

Now this was the stage of making teams fairly which couldn’t have become interesting enough if wouldn’t have included auction into it. As auction are much fair than making teams by ourself. As we decided 5 captains from 30 students on the basis of their capabilities.

I had to handle the post of the referee and even needed to manage the tournament and see that all the participants are on time and referees are available who knew the rule. My whole commitment was to give my best while referee sitting . We tried our best to be fair and square towards each and every participant.

Finally we had 5 teams and we are ready to start the tournament. So all we were left to decide the type of tournament and the fixtures. We decided that we will have knockout and league. First their will be knockout between 4 teams and 1 team who wins the coin toss will straight away got to league and other 2 teams from 4 will fight their way in the league and fromthat winner will be chosen. According to the structure of the tournament fixtures were decided but due to school academics meeting the fixture had to rearranged according to the dates of meeting. This became a hurdle in our project and delayed the matches which we eventually crossed.

So this was the time all the matches took place. Keeping in mind of ethical objectives to be fair during the whole journey of this tournament. We had closing ceremony where we rewarded the winning team and the best raider and defender. It was a great experience as we had exposer of taking spontaneous decisions and build great communication skills. We got know about the talent that players from different grades had which were unpredictable. I felt amazing as the tournament was finished and now we no more had to do multitasking work between our studies and tournament.

Our motive was to not only promote kabaddi as a sport, to encourage gender equality. As we had girls participating we were trying to bring a change in our surroundings. We also tried to cater to global issue in our society as girls are as good as boys and their are women even better men which is totally normal. Which we tried to break the stereotype as we had female participants which were doing extremely well. As they gave a tough competition to any gender who came across. This was to promote gender equality throughout the event which proved when invited any gender participant could participate in the tournament. This event made feel that i achieved something and by slowly taking action could  not only encourage girls to play kabaddi but also to encourage equality between two genders. This made me feel proud about the results of our action.

We earned profits which weren’t expected. We as a group decided to chose to buy stationery from our whole profit and donate to children. this was one more step closer to bring joy in children life and have an impact over society in positive way. We earned 1000 rupees, which were fully used to buy stationary, The fact that we again dealt with an issue of poverty. The moment i could never forget is when i saw a smile on the kid’s face which wasn’t going. At this moment i gained respect for things that i have which i have been exploiting for years. This not only makes me feel proud but also excited to conduct more activities of this type. I could proudly say that it was a successful event followed by a donation made the event valuable. I would be keen to do this type of events more often. casimg_20161121_182853

Gym Session

Gyming has never been my cup of tea. As in the day of 21st century i never get over with the electronics. But i have alway was in shape. I have never focused about my diet and never cared about it till the time i started seeing its outcome. As i never had energy left due to all those junk intake i was never hungry enough to consume health food. I use to think and have experienced for a month that doing gym exercises are always tiring and time-consuming.  

I tried gyming once before but it never worked as my football coach denied me to do it. As i am bit short in height so my coach told me not to focus my muscle.  I was trying to start gyming once again as My 6 friends were with me planning to do the same activities. It really made the activity less monotonous and more joyful.

The most difficult thing in this task was to wake up early morning. For that needed change my schedule according to it, but it also requires commitment to get out of bed in the early morning although I chose to wake up early. Due to my height i chose a different type of workout i use to do cardio, core and muscle stretching exercises. following this cycle allowed me find out my own strengths and weakness such as after 2 cycles I identified that my abs/abdominal is the strongest region compared to my other body parts therefore I was able to do 50plus sit ups in the second cycle itself and it is an area for further growth. The second most  challenging task was push-ups,it is a challenging task because it requires strength to lift up your own weight although this challenge was overcome by increasing balance and focusing more on my biceps workout on day 1 I did 5 push ups and on day 25 I did 30 push-up although I was committed to work on my weakness ,I committed to myself that I will increase the number of push up done by me although this commitment caused me to use lots of effort and hardwork to achieve my goal therefore it is not easy for me to commit things.

Soon cardio became my one of the major strength i reduced my weight i gained more stamina and could run for 25 minutes straight. This helped me in football majorly i had endurance to survive in the field for a whole game. As my goals were very simple to stay fit and healthy. And i stopped eating junk food for time while i was doing gyming.

I finally completed 4 months of gym training and see good changes in my physique.  I could see a great change in my Football skills due to the gym exercises. Being tiring, lead me to great results in my body.

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Teachers day celebration

Teachers are very important in our life as they share the knowledge they have and share it with students like us. Teaching is a type of trait which isn’t present in each and every student. So my friend and I took an initiative to teach student for 2 hour on teachers day. We were allotted grade 4 attitude.

The difficult part of the task was to maintain the class decorum. As kids wanted to play but we had to teach so to have a win-win situation for a day we made them study for whole 2 hours. They were troublesome and hard to handle and at this point of time i thought about how interestingly our teachers use to manipulate us to convince us to study. From this thought i decided that to make the learning creative and enjoyable we made them play an activity on their current unit migration. The activity was more of a quiz roulette where person fails to answer he need to do a dare which class decide. In this part of time communication skills and coordination with my friend was must and we were able to do it.

While teaching i was able to explore a skill that i consist was communication, I was able to communicate appropriately with the students as we need to make them feel as their teacher and to do so patient was an another challenge. It feels good to know that you possess skill which will help in future especially in my near future for my English exam IOC. Although it very important for a person to know his/her strength or weakness because it allows you to analyse yourself and helps you to know the areas which you are good at and areas where you need to work on.

After an hour kids were getting distracted and the interest level went down. Even Spontaneous act were must as after a hour of roulette student interest were shifting. On that point of time we gave them a break for 5 min and find a possible that could make the participating in class activity increases. This is where our Spontaneous act with creativity comes into picture as we used math where they were learning fractions make them use the math to get correct answer for multiple choice questions which we wrote on the board. This also test our capability of the patient and tolerance. As kids made a chaos out of the class in the end. After the constant 2 hour tolerance test i had especially had a sign of relief.

Now we know that teaching is much harder job than it seems to be, it’s hard to tell that how teacher deal with us, hats off to them .cas

GARBA FEST!!!

I have been seeing different flashmob in the different occasion where my friends were taking part in. I sort of had an idea about how could we make a flash mob blast in any type of audience. That opportunity was given to me by my friends were they asked me to choreograph a dance for a social cause which was about saving girl child. This time instead of performing in a mall we decided to perform in our school on the day Garba fest.

One of our friends organised this event in school on the 10th of October and they allowed us to crash their event and perform a flash mob. Volunteers were gathered from the word of mouth and survey conducted from the mail. This time we were a group of only 20 members. As this was a really huge event organized by my friends. we had to give our 100% to grab the audience’s attention. The challenges that I faced during the last flash mob were not because of the practice sessions or the time management but because of my academics. Managing the event and preparing for exams simultaneously was a difficult job. Nevertheless, like before as a team we gave in our 100% and cooperated with each other to make this last flash mob a perfect one. Women empowerment was our issue for this flash mob. In order to begin from home we took this up as our issue for performance in school because this is that one place where we study about women being discriminated and treated badly all over the world.

Facing ups and downs, overcoming all the challenges that came in our way as a team we created ASTH. All of us had different strengths and weaknesses. Combining all the strengths and eliminating all the weakness we made these series of events successful. This activity has given me a lot to remember. During the entire journey of performing flash mobs for social cause, apart from learning I have made some beautiful memories. By taking responsibility to choreograph and also had a good time making new friends during this journey.

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CAS profile

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Knowing Riyaa….

“Solitude has its own very strange beauty to it.” ~ Liv Tyler

My name is Riyaa Ruwala and I currently study in Fountainhead. I believe the quote above tells a lot about me. Being an introvert, parties and being around a huge crowd had never been my idea of enjoying but nevertheless I have always loved being one. Relatively many people think me to be a person who is full of the milk of human kindness because I am one of those shrinking violets who face a hard time in expressing themselves, so most of the times people don’t get to know me as I actually am but as someone who I by default portray myself as. People around me are habitual to believe that I am a hardworking and committed person, but those of who get close to me eventually come to know that I am just a lifelong procrastinator. My love for music (singing and drums which I recently started learning), books and movies always remind me who the real “RIYAA” is. Listening music, reading books and watching movies are way out for me, through which I can effortlessly escape from the external world and walk in a world of mine, where I can easily express myself, where situational/conditions are always in my favor allowing me to foster my thoughts and ideas. But I have undying wish to evolve myself as a person who can confidently carry herself into a huge crowd, express herself and her thoughts/ideas freely and easily.

Family and friends( the few that I have) are things that I cherish the most and is so grateful about because no matter what they have always been by my side and in addition to this I always find times when I can help them out to show them how important they are to mean and also because of the immense  satisfaction I receive. I have always thought life as long, unexpected, surprising and a wild journey and walking through the different phases of life with those who are positive, adventurous and enthusiast make every moment memorable.

Frankly, I have had only one dream, to get a job where I can just sit and watch movies and TV shows. However, when I talk about my current aim, it is to get into a reputed university so that I can fulfill the expectations and dream that my parents have had for a very long time. I cannot assure whether I will be successful in the profession I choose but I will always strive hard to be responsible and try bringing a difference in lives of the unprivileged(no matter how small or big).

“Make your best mistakes” were words taken from a song, which might seem very childish but has constantly motivated me to sometimes take a leap of faith or going with my craziest ideas (which has some or the other way always helped me to live my life to the fullest). The most valuable thing people in my life have taught me is to “never let go of my identity” because that what make me one of a kind.

Go Green..! (CAS project)

Like any other, person I used to read about environmental issues in newspapers or the internet, but rarely remember myself putting efforts for any cause. However, during my IB Diploma years, while studying ESS (Environmental Systems and Societies), I learned that small steps locally by individuals can sooner or later have a significant contribution to solving the larger problem. So, me and 2 other friends of mine, together we decided to undertake our share of responsibility towards the environment, we decided to build a mini nursery in our school. Also during the initial stages of our project we also found out that around 3 lakh trees are cut every year in the state of Gujarat (where we live), surprisingly it didn’t come as shock to me because somewhere I knew what kind and how substantial damage we were doing to the environment from a very long time. However, it made my commitment to my project more firm and unwavering. My project also gave me chance to enhance and test my time management and leadership skills and chance to learn skills i.e. gardening.

Before, planning we already had decided that we did not want our project to just a mere activity to address the issue of deforestation but also wanted it to be a token of appreciation for our school for all it had done for me in the past two years after I joined fountainhead and of course the environment, and hence we managed to produce a small but a quality nursery, with all the best resources we could arrange.

In order to achieve the above goal, we initially worked with an experienced plant nursery worker and environmentalist. Also, before beginning the execution, there were a lot of things that needed to place like, what kind of plants to grown, arranging resources for gardening, volunteers, a patch of land etc, which required a lot of research and persuasion. I had to continuously be in touch with the environmentalist for guidance as we were, just freshers in this field (:P) collaborating with us in this project.

All seemed set to go and we were ready to execute our project after a rigorous planning for one month. But suddenly things started to fall apart, we didn’t realize what kept coming and hitting us. Our half of the seeds were misplaced, the patch the three of us cleared to plant on (which took us more than 3 three hours) was found to be inappropriate for gardening and lastly the environmentalist we were collaborating with and replying heavily on bailed out on us (we were hardly able to communicate with him). Subsequently, with all these problems showing one after the other our execution was delayed by two more months as soon, volunteers started bailing out as well as exams were soon approaching and considering it took us two weeks to arrange seeds and clear the patch and persuade volunteers we had almost given up on this project.

However, soon after the exams, even though we wanted a quality project; we realised that to do that we did not require a top-notch environmentalist, we started again with the project now working with our school gardener, we faced challenges to arrange seeds and bags to grow plants in without the environmentalist who was earlier arranging everything for us, but with our commitment and little more help from our school teachers we were able to arrange all the necessary resources (however did not compromise with the quality). Also, without any volunteers we knew it would be difficult to execute the project but not impossible so again started to call out for volunteers, initially when we started our execution nobody turned on early mornings, but we didn’t lose our hopes and started the project single-handedly, first day was tiring as hell as only three of us were trying to all the different jobs on our own. But as we did we realized I was more hardworking, responsible, determined and patient than I thought. Overall our quick and effective thinking and processing skills helped us come up with an alternative plan with all the flaws in our first one. Also this project helped me personally realize that how I needed to enhance my management skills after reflecting on the mistakes that we made during our planning process especially taught me the importance of commitment, like if broken it can mess things up for us badly (like we gave our volunteers a time period for the execution with all the problems we faced we forgot to keep them in loop and broke our commitment leading to no volunteers in the end).

After a while, few volunteers started showing up, not regularly but it did help us a lot and accelerated our project significantly. Moreover, working collaboratively also helped me gain motivation which I lacked previously. Also when own me and two of my friends were working alone but with three of together, it was a great support in tough times, which helped me mentally stabilize and think rationally in difficult circumstances. This project helped me learned gardening skills, how to form a contingency plan, how to persuade other and enhance my management skills.
Lastly, the important return this project gave me was: a sense of satisfaction and achievement.

 

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