CAS Evaluation (04/13)

Creativity:

1. Attending piano lessons (50min) every Monday after school in the Music Schule in Zurich.
2. Guitar lessons in the school every tuesday afternoon after lunch.

• This experience helped me a lot to improve many areas related to my personal growth: increasing awareness of my personal strengths, persevere on my passions and commit in the activity I signed up for, and in the end I developed new skills. Increasing awareness of my personal strengths and learning new skills was shown when the teacher gave new scores to play that increased of difficulty every time. I have been posting on my blog almost all of them. Showing perseverance and commitment in practicing a little bit almost everyday and keep on trying even if I was struggling. I have to get over every single piece I start! All of this reflects in the same way on my guitar lessons.

Action:

1. Training for the 10km run in Zurich going running every friday after school from the beginning of may to the day of the run.
2. Swimming in the Zumikon pool every Saturday morning with a few classmates.
   

• The 10km run made me take new challenges. Especially because I felt the necessity of a good training and the regular commitment to achieve my goal. I really like sports but running is one I do not very much enjoy, but I decided that the Zurich run would have been an interesting challenge to face. It turned out to be a important experience because I improved my weekly sport activity (good for health) and I had to show first to myself that I was committed and I was willing to persevere in what I wasted to do (valid for swimming as well). Training also allowed me to know myself better and find out till where I can push myself (valid for swimming as well). I also started to better know the territory I Iive in, as I have tried to exercise over a variety of different paths while training. In fact I have tried to change them as much as I could every time.

Service:

1. Playing at the sound of music, helping setting up the room for the performance and cleaning up everything at the end of the show (stage, chairs, decorations, instruments etc).
2. Starting next week: teaching volleyball to G4 and G5

• Undertaking this activity (SOM) pushed me to face new challenges and work collaboratively with a group of people (see reflection "End of SOM"). At the same time showing perseverance and commitment has been really important as the time spent to practice, organize, and get every detail of the show ready for the audience took a lot of time. 
• Teaching volleyball still has to start in a week time and for the moment I can only give some ideas of what I hope to achieve doing this project. Mainly I hope this challenge will help me to improve my group working skills. Improving collaboration, communication with the team and planning beforehand will be necessary to teach our student in the best possible way. This activity will force me to undertake new challenges as this year I am one of the organizer of every lesson. I did this experience last year as well but that time I was under the guidance of 12th grader so I was following her instruction while teaching the kids. I am very convinced this experience will  increase the awareness of my own strengths and weakness so that it will be easier to know where I have to improve. 

Teaching Volleyball to G4 and G5

On the 21^st of April I will start teaching volleyball to 4^th and 5^th graders in the ICS gym. The lessons will run for 45 minutes  and I will teach the kids with two other classmates of the school. I did this experience last year as well and I found out that it is really hard for such young kids to start playing volleyball matches. For this reason I have been looking for website that explain easy games that relate the volleyball basics to simple and easy games. In this way they will learn the basic concepts in a more pleasant way and maybe for the end of the course we might be able to play an actual game. I have found a very interesting website that gave me a lot of ideas to use. It is in Italian but I will translate it in English for my classmates to understand what to do.  

Link to the PDF: http://www.savonafedervolley.it/pagine/allenatori/allievo/minivolley/eserciziminivolley.pdf

10km Run

On Sunday the 7th of April I ran the 10km run in the city of Zurich. For me it has been a really nice and new experience.

I have always loved sports but I have never really enjoyed running long distances for a long period of time. With a friend in my grade I have decided to take the chance and challenge ourself. The month before the race I started to train myself constantly every week. I usually used my Fridays, after school, to go out and run for a few hours in the woods around Zumikon. This gave me the chance to try different grounds and steepness. The training on a variety of paths helped me to get more ready for the final race and on the day of the run that gave its tangible results. 
While preparing for the race I was brought closer to some events in the "running" history and I have found out about the many doping events that have occurred. This made me think about the ethics that has to be respected while running a race. I thought about the unfairness of unfairly advantaging yourself in disfavor of the other runners. Considering the amount of time I have dedicated to my preparation I realized how bad I would feel I would have founded out that people had been cheating.

I found this experience very interesting and I am definitely looking for doing it again next year, maybe involving more people because it is an event that really involves you personally and makes you learn to understand yourself better. You definitely need to know when you need to stop and rest otherwise it will be really hard to get to the end and not to wake up with sore muscles. 

End of SOM

Sound of Music reached its end. On wednesday 13.03.13 the entire crew (band, actors, make up and stage directors) met at 8 am in the main building to perform the play for the first time in front of an audience. The tension was really high but as we spent a lot of time together during practice, and so we manage to help each other out. We had a few problems before the play because some changing on the music had to be done to fit better with the singing, this has been easily overcame as we manage to communicate well with each other. For the first time I was sitting behind the curtains of the show and I saw everything that I never saw before. Change of scene, the large number of people needed to actually run the entire show and the incredible need of communication between the entire crew. One thing I really enjoyed was hearing the sound of laughter coming from the kids of the primary  school due to the jokes in the play. 

On the thursday and friday we had the evening performances for all the parents. The pressure was even higher as we knew that our family members and friends where there listening to us and we all wanted to make a good impression on them. Saturday afternoon was instead the final performance. The end of a great show that took a lot of our effort and time to prepare. The end was amazing as we all got to go on stage and get all the appreciation of the spectators. We all received a rose as congratulation and then we started to play again to make a better atmosphere when all the people were leaving. When everyone left we had a great time celebrating together as a united group and we had to clean up everything left over from the show. When stage, decoration, chairs and instrument got taken away we all left, leaving the show behind us but in out memories.

I found out that playing in a band is a very nice experience as you get to know more people, you have to learn how to work in a group and how to cooperate with a big number of people playing different notes at the same time. It has been a challenging experience but it was definitely worth it to improve playing skills and to offer help to the community of the school.  

 It took us almost 3 months to prepare for all of this but after the different shows I realized that everything was definitely worth it. I came to understand my strength and weaknesses while playing. In fact, playing alone and with a group of people completely changes your frame of reference. When you are alone you only concentrate on what you are doing, when in a group your part seems to somehow end up being in the background. In reality it is in the foreground but accompanied by all the rest of the group. I have to admit that playing with a group is very hard and I feel more confident playing by myself as I can concentrate only on what I am doing and not also on what everyone else is doing. This might be a limitation of mine, but that is how I have felt about it.

The picture shows the view of the stage I had from my position in the band (playing the piano).