Final visit to the Alzheimer's center for this year.

Yesterday the Alzheimer's Group made a very special visit to the Alzheimer's center to round up the year of 2011.

This visit was different to others because of 2 main reasons:
- The purpose of the visit was to drop off the dry food items that our school community had donated during the past few weeks. This is the first fund raising activity that was planned, organized and initiated completely by ourselves, without any help from the foundation it self. By the end of it we managed to collect around 10kg of rice, 10kg of flour, 5kg of milk powder, 5kg of dhal and several jars of Sri Lankan style pickled chutney.

- In addition to this, we also got to actually meet and interact with the patients yesterday! This was a great experience, and our group members instantly engaged with them. We look forward to making more frequent visits to the center next year to ensure this happens more often.

Raising Donations for Alzheimer's

For the few weeks our group has been focusing on raising donations for the newly established Alzheimer's center. As they are still in the initial stages, the Foundation greatly appreciates any help given from volunteers.

On behalf of the Overseas School of Colombo, the Alzheimer's group decided to invite the school community to donate dry food items such as Rice, Flour, Dhal, etc, to be used for the purpose of the daily meal that is provided for the patients.

Heesoo and I have been very busy these days trying to get everything organized, and we have largely concentrated our meetings on spreading the word to the school community, as well as actually collecting the items.

Our strategy for raising awareness included sending an email to the school principle in order to gain permission, announcing the activity in assembly after this, emailing parents of the secondary school, and finally emailing the students to remind and reiterate the point.

This process has greatly improved our formal letter writing, and also our persuasive and informative skills.

In addition to the donation of food items, we have also been focusing on acquiring board games which can be used during the leisure/entertainment time by the patients. We appealed to the Primary School teachers about this, and got very good responses.

Heesoo and I are very proud of what we have been able to achieve through these meaningful activities, and have been getting a lot of positive comments from many teachers in our school about this year's Alzheimer's Service being a lot more active than previous years. That, more than anything, means a lot to us, and make us feel like we're actually doing a good job as leaders :)

Alzheimer's presentation during assembly

Yesterday during assembly Heesoo and I made a presentation about the Memory Box activity that we're planning.Additionally, we also appealed to the school community about donating dry food items to the centre, and the primary school about donating board games for the purpose of the entertainment of the patients.

The assembly announcement required quick adaptation, as the person who was supposed to give the presentation was not able to come to school, which required Heesoo and I to stand up to the challenge on such short notice. (hence I may have sounded like I wanted to run away while I was doing this unrehearsed and unexpected task :P)

The purpose of the Memory Box activity is to raise awareness about the importance of preserving memories.

All these activities are going to take a lot of planning on mine and Heesoo's part, but I feel that we're up to the challenge.

Supervising a Grade 6 class

Yesterday I was requested by Ms. Trina, a teacher at our school to supervise her Grade 6 class for 10 minutes near the end of the day. This was quite an experience, as the Grade 6 class proved to be a group of...enthusiastic, energetic and excited kids, especially so near hometime :P

I haven't gotten to spend too much time with kids of that age recently, and I don't really remember what I myself was like at that age, so I'm not completely sure whether this is true, but one of them assured me "don't worry, we are like this all the time", probably out of pity as I was running around looking foolish trying frantically to make them stay quite.

I would like to think that I made a good authority figure, with a certain amount of assertiveness, especially when I made sure that they cleaned up the classroom and put the chairs and tables back as they were supposed to. I would also like to think that they did not grumble too much about me, as I stood firmly by the door to ensure that they did not run away before they completed this task :P

All in all, I have learnt through this experience to really appreciate my teachers from now on, and perhaps also to exclude teaching as a choice for my own career in the future :P

Selling food for Yearbook

Yesterday at the Secondary Drama Production, we raised funds for the yearbook group by selling refreshments during the intermission.

I volunteered to bring drinks, but took part in selling other things as well.

Since the start of the new year, this was the first opportunity to brush up on my business skills. We worked as a team behind the counter, and were helping each other over all the chaos to ensure a quick customer service. :)

Link to Alzheimer's Blog!

As promised, here is the link to the newly created Alzheimer's Blog:

http://alzheimerscasosc.blogspot.com/

The blog is still in the early stages but members of our group will soon be accessing it and adding their thoughts, experiences and ideas on it, so please bear with us :)

Key Club Update: A blog for Alzheimer's.

Today we had a Key Club meeting where we discussed the need to create individual Service Group Blogs that will run regular updates on what is happening.

My co-leader Heesoo and I plan to get this blog up and running soon (in around 2 weeks) and I will post a link to it on here.

The blog will have information on funds we've raised, various activities we have taken part in, upcoming events and general information about the Alzheimer's disease.

During the second part of our meeting we took part in a small group activity where we discussed the interrelationship between 'Service' and 'Learning' and I realized it is essentially both of them together make up our unique Community Service Program at OSC. I really feel fortunate to be part of such a complete and whole-rounded program!