Yoga practice

Practicing Yoga

After completing my Yoga classes in the Indian Cultural Centre last year, this year I mainly focused on continuing what I learnt.  I planned to practice this at least 3 times a week. To make sure that I don’t forget the asanas, I kept track of them by writing them and then practicing them step by step. This will make sure that I do the right positions at the right time. By doing yoga, I was aware of my strengths and realized how beneficial it is in my daily life. I could easily undertake challenges as I think practicing yoga is a great stress relief.  Learning yoga has made me develop this new skill to a higher level where I started looking for online tutorials. 

Goals of Semester 2

This semester will be the final semester for me in CAS, so I have to make sure that I do well this semester and be productive. My goals for this semester are a bit different. This semester, I plan to do more in each activity. This will be a busy semester to handle. With the exams coming in May, I have to make sure I balance all my activities. My goals for each activity are as below:

Cooking: My goals for cooking this semester is to learn to cook more sweets. This will be something that I always enjoy doing. I also made plans to learn to cook sugar-free food after achieving this goal. My mother knows how to make Indian sweets, so I will be learning from her. My goal is to learn to make atleast 2 sweets before the end of this semester.

Yoga: I have been practising yoga three times a week. I'm not able to go to classes anymore, so I'm not able to learn more about it. My goal is to continue doing what I learnt. This will be beneficial for my physical and mental health.

RCCI: We make sure that children are always enjoying their weekly visit to OSC. We have tried including different activities for them to do. But this year I want to do some fund-raising. As a leader, I want to be mroe productive. We are planning on different possible things that can be done to raise money. T-Shirt painting is one of them.  I will discuss this plan in mroe detail in my next post. This fudn raising activity will be for the primary children who can paint a T-Shirt and buy them.

Cooking Halwa (Indian Sweet)

Halwa that I made

This month, me cooking aim was to learn to make the popular Indian sweet dish, Wheat Halwa. This sweet is made mainly from wheat, sugar and clarified butter.  I learnt to make this sweet from my mom who has been making this since she was young. She first explained the origination of this dish briefly and then started instructing me on the ingredients that I need. I started following the instruction and realized how hard it is to put together all the ingredients. This gave a me a new experience where I'm improving my cooking skills. I also understood the importance of patience while cooking food. I worked collaboratively with my mom, she made sure she did not put any ingredient by herself, in the other hand she made me do all of it so that I learn more effectively.

The dish was served to my family. They liked the taste of it, even though it was not as good as my mother, it was a good try for the first time. I'm now happy that I learnt to make one of the most popular dishes from the Indian cuisine. I will make sure that I continue to learn and make more. :)

Singing for the first time! :)

Kuval and I before the performance

Singing has always been something I wanted to do but it was also something that I was not really good at. But, this Diwali (an important festival in India), I wanted to try singing with my friend Kuval. The function was held by the Indian Embassy in the Taj in Colombo. We were given the chance to sing. (I couldn’t get a picture of us singing though, I have a video but it is not much clear to see). We sang a Hindi  song and tried our best to impress the audience. I realized that I had this other strength in me which I was not aware of before. This challenge was something I voluntarily took and now I was able to prove that I could do it.   I was happy and satisfied that I could do something that I thought that I cannot achieve. Also, I had to wear a saree for this performance, this made me involve myself more with my Indian community and our culture.  I wanted to develop this skill but right now I won’t have time to do that. However, I plan to do this in future. 

Raising toys for RCCI

 END OF YEAR GIFT FOR RCCI KIDS

At the end of the last year we decided to end the school year for the RCCI kids satisfactorily by trying to getting gifts in the form of toys, play boards, soft toys, and cartoon figures, sports equipments like balls, bats and skipping ropes. This was quite challenging as this was going to be my first fund raising activity. So we decided to make an announcement in the primary assembly and asked the kids to donate their old toys for the unprivileged. We even sent letter home so that it reaches the parent. This activity also made the OSC community aware of the global issues faced in this world, so they actively responded.It turned out to be that the primary has been really generous to the kids. We had just kept one box in the primary office for the kids to donate. But we got to know that the box is already over flowing in two days. There were a number of ethical implications with this because we had to make sure all the parents who came to donate their belongings were treated with respect, if anything goes wrong, they might be disappointed. So we took this challenge by making sure we thank everyone for their donation. This made us really happy and we collected a lot of toys in the one week notice. We even got lot of brand new toys for them. I realised that this strength in our CAS team can make us capable of achieving more. 

Toys we gathered for the kids

We later separated the good ones as in the ones that don’t scare these kids. We separated the Dinosaurs toys, scary animal figures and army figures. These toys often scared the RCCI kids. So we decided to give them rather simple board games, soft toys and the ones they would like. We gifted them on the last CAS day and we even gave a box of toys for the center. We still have some stored. We plan to give more this year.

Cooking aims for September

For September, I decided to learn with the basics of Indian food. This might include making "Pongal" which is a meal eaten usually for breakfast with a sauce (preferably a coconut one). This has been my all time favorite dish and is best when served hot. Learning to make this from my mother will be a good idea as she is really good in making this. This will also make be independent as I would not have to ask her to make it every time for me. I can prepare it with  more of the kind of taste I like (which has less spiciness). A picture of is shown to show how it looks like.

CAS presentation for the OSC kids

All the CAS leaders after the presentation

There was another awareness program about CAS this year. This was specially held to inform the primary kids who just joined MYP. We thought that it is necessary for them to know what different CAS activities do. This will help them choose the CAS they want to participate in, in the following semester. This activity will increase awareness to the OSC community and also at the same time make me work collaboratively with my CAS members in planning the activity.  Our CAS is involved with such an important global issue that it is necessary to update the people about what we do. This activity made me proud that I’m involved in this CAS and I was satisfied with the number of people who wanted to join this CAS.