Creativity, Activity, Service: Teaching students meaningful life lessons through hands-on learning

Students studying the IB Diploma Programme at the Academy have been regularly volunteering to spend some quality time on various projects that enable service-based learning. Over the last few days, around 28 students of DP 1 had planted more than 300 different varieties of organic vegetables and flowers on the Academy campus!

With excitement in the air, grins on their faces and hopes of creating something new, students were seen geared-up, hurdling towards the farm, to try their hands at organic farming! Around 98 saplings of each of eggplant, green chili, tomatoes and marigold flower were planted by our students over the last few days.

As a part of the IB Diploma Programme, Creativity, Activity, Service (CAS), enables young children to experience real-life scenarios that will help them to achieve a state of personal well-being.

Students who chose organic farming as their CAS project are learning about the process of growing organic plants, right from the stage of planning, ploughing, seeding, weeding, harvesting, to finally selling the crops in the market. Students are under constant guidance provided by their project supervisors and the CAS coordinator- who are not only overseeing their tasks but are also helping students at identifying problem areas and discussing with them the effective ways of arriving at solutions.

Expressing his happiness over students demonstrating pro-activeness at farming, Mr Venkat Reddy, CAS Coordinator said, “I feel extremely proud at our students’ sincere dedication and hard-work. Their initiative to work both, individually and collaboratively, towards accomplishing their responsibilities at farming is simply commendable! Our team is making sure that farm responsibilities are rotated periodically so that each participant gets an opportunity to experience all aspects of farming.”

In the context of education, the Academy believes that it is important to integrate academic teachings with work-readiness, life-skills and mental resourcefulness– when combined, will help at crafting a holistic learning environment. As a matter of fact, farming is just one of the many opportunities for our students to learn many valuable life lessons through hands-on learning.