Find out how Chatsworth International School provides a holistic education through embedding service learning and action into its curriculum
In today’s world, raising smart, well-rounded kids is all that matters. Nobody knows that better than Chatsworth International School. Its Service Learning programme is an important part of the MYP, helping kids understand their place and role in communities, from their immediate family and school environment to the world at large.
HoneyKids recently had a chat with two Year 9 students from Chatsworth, Reese Hall and Hannah Bempasciuto, about their experience in creating a food bank together with a group of students for their Service Learning project and how it’s given them a different perspective on life…
What does service learning mean to you as a student at Chatsworth International School?
It gave us experience in real-world skills such as organisational skills and logistics. We had to work as a team and communicate and collaborate with each other. It’s also good because it felt relevant to the world and gave us a different perspective from our own lives into the lives of others when we were researching why food banks were needed.
Could you tell us about your service learning project? What kind of work did your project entail?
We worked with Food Bank Singapore where we organised a food drive to collect food to be passed onto people in need of assistance in Singapore. Apart from collecting the food, we also raised self-awareness of issues relating to food poverty and hunger.
What part of the project did you like the most and the least?
The food collection was fun as we got to meet with people and interact with them. It was satisfying to see that our project had worked and we had raised awareness of the issue and got people to help. Sometimes the events we had planned for food drive fell through such as presentations we were supposed to give and missed. We overcame this by having a whole group discussion on what went wrong and came up with an action plan to fix the issues we were having. After we had done this we had a lot more solid plan that we stuck to and it worked.
What was the most important thing you learned from working on your project?
We learned that whilst we can’t help everybody in the world suffering from hunger we can help at a local level and that grass roots movements like this are important.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome while working on this project?
Time management and meeting deadlines were a big challenge but we were able to develop realistic goals as the project went on and then made sure we stuck to these. It really helped develop our understanding of what it’s like to manage a big project and we had to draw on skills we had learnt in our different classes to help with this.
How has working on this project changed you as a person?
It has helped us open our eyes to some of the difficulties others face and inspire us to try and help others in our local community. It made us realise that we can make a positive difference in the world.
Will you be getting involved in more projects like this in the future?
Yes, the food bank is a great project to be involved in and it will definitely run again next year. We will take steps to expand the range of the project such as running more food drives and looking at other areas we could expand into such as clothing drives or used toy drives.
If you could do the project over again, what would you change?
Our time management would be the first thing we would change. We learnt so much this year about how to be more organised and meet deadlines and we think putting this into effect would make the food bank a lot more successful.
Thank you, Reese and Hannah!
To learn more about Service Learning and the MYP programme at Chatsworth International School, book a tour and speak to one of its friendly admissions representatives.
This post is sponsored by Chatsworth International School