Throughout the first year of IB, I had done different activities for CAS and experienced new activities that I have never done before or did not do for a long time. CAS allowed me to focus on activities outside my school assignments which I had found really helpful as it brought me back to exploring new activities and building more skills on activities that I have tried. By exploring new activities, I discovered new interests, as well as activities that I am not interested in.
Through doing CAS, I have experienced several challenges, such as not knowing what activities I should do, or not having enough time to balance between the workload that my different classes give, and doing the activities that I have to do for CAS. Having these obstacles made me find more ways to learn to be more balanced, as I came to a realization that it can be easy to stress about the amount of tasks that I have and end up not doing anything, therefore, being able to set a schedule and to think ahead of what I should do for CAS helped me. This made me more motivated to complete my other tasks on time, and to be able to complete two CAS experiences and reflections each month. Overtime, I would find it more difficult to discover a new activity that I can do and is easily accessible to me, which had led me to constantly doing the same activities for several months in a row. Moving forward, I plan to be able to participate in more new activities, initiate ideas with my peers to participate in a new experience together, and to discover and participate in more new service opportunities.
Despite the obstacles that I have encountered, CAS has benefitted me by helping to build my skills in different activities, such as knitting and baking, which I have always been interested in, but did not have the time to improve on previously. I experienced new activities, and also participated in activities that I used to do. After completing an activity each time, I found that reflecting on the activities allowed me to understand areas that I can focus on for the certain activities, as well as what I had found interesting about it. This connects to the IB Learner Profile of being reflective, as I considered my strengths and weaknesses when thinking about how I can improve on my skills and develop self-improvement. Doing CAS each month has also helped me become more committed and persevered to be able to start a task and to complete it on time. Not only did I find it important to be committed to my CAS experiences, I also developed commitment to outside activities and tasks, which I found beneficial to be able to work hard and do well in school.
CAS has helped me build self-improvement as I learned to identify my own strengths and weaknesses for develop areas for growth. It helped me grow as a learner as I became more organized and committed to tasks that I have been assigned, and had learned the importance of completing the tasks on time. I improved on my organization skills by being able to set a schedule and a task list to know which tasks I have to do and when I should get it done by. Other than organization, I have also sparked new interests in different activities that I experienced while doing CAS, and also improved on different skills.