A PYP exhibition is the final presentation a student makes before graduating from PYP (Grade 6). I enjoyed my PYP exhibition when I was in the 6th grade and I wanted to be of help to mentees and make sure they enjoyed theirs too amid covid. For this CAS initiative, I mentored 3 PYP students for their topic of research: mental health and well-being. I helped them in their research by providing website links they could look at and any verbal help they wanted by answering their questions in relation to mental health and well-being. We talked over google meets and were supervised by their mentor.

The learning outcomes I achieved were: LO3, LO4, LO6, LO7
LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.
LO4: Show commitment and perseverance in their CAS experience.
LO6: Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.
LO7: Recognise and consider the ethics of choices and actions.

The CAS strands catered were: C (creativity) and S (service)

LO3: For this particular CAS experience, I was especially enthusiastic (evidence below). I kept troubling teachers and planning about when this experience would begin, what role I would have to play, how many students would I mentor, what topics would I speak to them about, how long it will go on etc. After the experience started, I was very eager about learning about the mentees’ topics and helping them as best as I could. This helped me learn about taking initiatives and making first contact and following up, which I believe is very useful.

LO4: Even though this CAS experience was something I was keenly following up on, it was very difficult to keep helping my mentees, especially because their questions and the timing of the experience was clashing with my exam schedules. It was very difficult to take out merely 30 mins from my schedule to research about the questions my mentees asked and filtering the answers (I was asked to provide age appropriate answers–for 11-12 year olds), however, I did answer them and the commitment and perseverance was helpful–it helped me complete my task on time.

LO6: The global issue my mentees were researching on was Mental health and well-being. Quite a significant issue, in my opinion. I believe that a person can be defined by their mental health and it is a very important aspect of life–to keep mental well-being in check. There are abundant cases of stress, anxiety, depression etc in the world, which make this topic that much more crucial. Through this experience, I added more to my knowledge about mental health and well-being–particularly because I learned about ‘color psychology’ a branch of psychology that focuses on the impact of colors on human behaviour. While learning myself, I helped contribute in teaching others as well.

LO7: considering ethics, I took various pictures of our google meet sessions (with everyone’s permission) and my email interactions with my mentees but I chose to pixelate the names and images of the people to help maintain their privacy. This issue doesn’t affect me directly but it reminds me of how important privacy is and that it shouldn’t be violated. Furthermore, mental health does include many aspects of ethics and what I researched and helped my mentees with was ethical.

FINAL TAKEAWAY:

• Learner profile: communicator – communication was very important throughout the experience (between the mentees, their supervisor and I, knowledgeable – I provided answers verbally as well as through research.
• One of my subjects: Psychology, is connected directly to this topic as psychology focuses mainly on human behaviour and mental health and well being is a considerable part of human behaviour.
• This learning, specifically information about color psychology, might help me in my future psychology classes and it may also help me understand people and their choices better.

Images below for google meet:

Images below for email interactions: