Fish Pond Clean up - Experience of a student on her CAS activity

IB has been a new, but so far a pleasant experience for me and one of the many new initiatives and activities that I am experiencing include the concept of CAS. For our second CAS activity, a group of students from 11^th IB set out to clean up the junior school fish pond. Beforehand, several of the seniors had mockingly warned me about this activity, and naturally, I was apprehensive and reluctant to get filthy.

 

I promised myself that I would be open-minded during this activity, so I immediately jumped into the pond in order to catch the fish, along with a pair of hot-pink gloves that I brought along for my comfort. The larger fish wriggled and squirmed out of my hands with no effort, so I settled on catching the smaller fish, which politely obliged. 

After removing the fish from the pond, more students began to wade through the waters, and we started to scrub the stones and sides of the pond. The real job was cleaning up the pebbles which were covered in a slimy green coating that was stubbornly removed. I quickly fell into a pattern which allowed me to effectively clean the stones, chatting with my neighbors in the process. As it had only been a few weeks since IB had started this was a great activity in which I bonded with the other students, outside a classroom environment. It gave me the opportunity to collaborate and work to achieve a common goal together, and get to know each other along the way. I can truly say that I have become closer to a couple of my ‘fish pond buddies’, however I will always remember their stench afterwards.

The scrubbing ended and we refilled the pond and returned the fishes back to their now restored home. This was my favorite part of the activity: releasing the fish, and watching them with contentment, swimming around in the now clear and glistening waters.

This activity was a new challenge for me, but had many useful outcomes. Firstly it was a joint successful effort, but every single student showed perseverance by not giving up as it was a tiring activity. In addition, I think we all developed a couple of home cleaning skills, which most of us did not have before.

At the beginning of this activity I was not very happy with the idea of wading around in murky water. However near the end of the activity, after getting over my initial fear of becoming dirty, I jumped into the water to give a helping hand without hesitation.