Woah, today was a really long day. There was team meeting in the morning, and then we broke up to update and discuss with our comms. After that, we had a rather hurried lunch in our comms with much laughter and fun, and then Cultural Exchange(CXC)! Thanks so much, Frubs, for teaching us the different dances! This year, we have Chinese, Malay and Indian Dance, along with a Mass dance to the High School Musical song, “All for One”. (:  Things are going well so far!

After CXC was physical conditioning at the physical fitness centre. This workout routine’s starting to feel less straining, and I guess it really does help increase our strength and endurance, in preparation for the trip.
The trip’s so soon, I’m really excited. Everyone should be packing right now!

Are you ready? :D

It’s excitingly close to the day we leave Singapore! Only 5 days now!

This year, OSL has expanded to two teams: Team 1 and Team 2. Team 1 will be going to Philippines and Team 2, to Cambodia. The preparation for the trip has been long and tough, but we know it’ll be worth it! (:

Throughout the year, we have had several activities and courses, but one highlight is definitely Local Service Learning(LSL).We collaborated with The National Library Board and volunteered in the KidsRead! programme. The aim of OSL’s local service learning is to ensure that we are meeting the needs of our immediate community and also serves as practice since we will be working with children in our respective destinations. We were required to undergo a workshop arranged by NLB to prepare us for the sessions at Kaki Bukit and Simei centres, which were held twice a week. Of course, our time and effort were not futile as we readily took the opportunity to learn about handling children and working with people from different backgrounds. All in all, it was a fruitful and fulfilling experience for us, and we looked forward to the sessions with the kids.

<3,
OSL 2010

Here are some photos taken during our trip to Cambodia last year. We are grateful for the chance to have this experience, and it is something we won’t forget in a long time to come. (:

“Have the serenity to accept the things you can’t change, the courage to change those you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – anonymous.

yours truly,

OSL 09, legacy of love <3

Only a week left to our trip! OSL has been actively preparing for the trip – we’ve had many CXC (cultural exchange, which will be performed for the Cambodians towards the end of our trip) dance practices after school over the past 2 weeks and each comm has been busy getting ready as well.

For CXC practices, we are split into 3 groups, each doing a different dance. We have a Chinese dance, Malay dance, and Hip hop! All were choreographed by our very own CXC comm. The CXC practices were tiring but fun! We had to keep doing our steps over and over to get them. Everyone tried very hard to familiarize themselves with the steps so that we could go home to practice some more. Thanks to our CXC comm for being so patient in teaching us the steps :)

The trip is getting closer and closer – are you feeling the excitement?? :)

On 15 Oct, our team had a cooking course conducted by the Aesthetics department in our school. This was so that we could learn to cook simple dishes with ingredients found in Cambodia. During our trip, we will be preparing all our meals by ourselves, so this course was really very important!

This is how we split up the work:

Team 1 – vegetable curry, couscous and green bean dessert

Team 2 – peanut porridge, stir-fried vegetables and sweet-potato dessert

Team 3 – vegetarian bee hoon, bee hoon soup and barley with sago dessert

We had a lot of fun learning to cook these dishes, and everyone got to bring home some of the mouth-watering food that they cooked. We would very much like to thank the Aesthetics teachers for taking the time to teach us :) We really appreciate it! and I must say, our teacher’s recipes are really good :D

Last Friday (23 Oct), we had our Parent’s Meet, held in school! This was exciting for us because it was an opportunity for us to present OSL to our parents and the committees that work together in this project, and also about the upcoming trip itself.

There was much to get ready for this important day, especially preparing what we were going to say to the parents and how to present it. There were also refreshments to be prepared (cooked by our own logs comm!), and pamphlets to be made which would be given to the parents. We also received one of our t-shirts in advance so that we could wear it with pride during the meet.

On the day of the meet itself, each comm gave a powerpoint presentation on their jobscope, what they had been doing since the beginning of the year, and what will be next. Mr Segarra also talked about our trip to Cambodia (which is in less than a month!), including accommodation, travel plans, itinery, safety precautions and what to expect. After that, we had a Q&A session for our parents to clarify whatever doubts they had. Finally, Mrs Julie Hoo also stood up to talk about OSL and praised us for all our efforts, and encouraged us to do our best for the Cambodians :)

After refreshments, which turned out to be extremely delicious, we cleared up and went home with our parents. We hope that they are now more reassured and heartened with the knowledge we have very capable teacher-mentors, encouraging and caring mentors and a group of committed and enthusiastic members of OSL. :)

Sec 4 netcarn was a good learning experience for all of us. We started out the day well with everyone arriving on time and the drinks arriving on time, but as time went on things got a little messy. Firstly, the sales of bubble tea was not as good as we expected, and surprisingly, the 100plus actually sold faster than the bubble tea.

Learning point: During sports events people would rather buy something isotonic than something sweet, so we will order more 100plus for the subsequent netcarns.

That said, with the fact that we had too many bubble tea packets, coupled with the stress of our coming EYAs, we forgot the service part of this fundraising. We were a little impolite to the public causing us to accidentally ‘degrade’ our reputation. But with that said, we will definitely do better for the next fundraising event.

Learning point: Don’t lose focus of the fact that fundraising events are essentially a service to the public.

Teachers’ Day was fantastic!! Well of course we had fun with the performance and the class parties and all the gifts! But after all the fun, it was down to hardwork – car washing. But first, I would like to memtion that we did not forget giving the teachers gifts. We got together and made a nice card for all the teachers. :)

Back to car-washing. After the class parties we got together and set out in our teams. To the CLEANING + BEAUTIFYING jobs! Washing cars may be hard work, but it was really fun. We as a team get to splash/clean cars together and it doubly serves as a fundaising event and team bonding event.

Mr Segarra helped us too and Mr Mizar gave us a US$5 to wash his car. We were all shocked with the fact that Mr Mizar carried all sorts of currency, but Singapore dollers.

Oh and one more thing, this car wash was done at a discounted price, as it was Teachers’ Day. Instead of the usual 10 bucks per car, we did it for 6 dollers instead. All in all we had great fun and all. :)

On 19 August 2009, we celebrated World Humanitarian Day in school :)

World Humanitarian Day is a day to pay tribute to the brave humanitarian workers who devote their time and energy to come to the rescue of innocent victims of war/natural catastrophes across the world (for the first time in year 2009!). It will be celebrated throughout the world, and as RGS strongly encourages meaningful engagement in service to the community, WHD is an opportunity for us to highlight this. Hence, we used this day to raise awareness about what we do in OSL, as well as to commemorate the humanitarian spirit of all those humanitarian workers in the past and present.

We played 4 songs in the morning – Earth Song, Man In The Mirror, Send It On and Where Is The Love :) We also sold bubble tea during the recesses. This time, sales were much more organized, but we forgot to stock-take beforehand, which caused a lot of confusion. This was an oversight on our part, and we now realise how important stocktaking is.  But overall, fundraising for WHD was fun! Furthermore, through this, we hope to inspire our peers in school to participate in service-learning wholeheartedly. :)

For National Day celebrations in our school this year, OSL decided to add to the festive spirit by selling bubble tea (:

Bubble tea is, as always, an extremely hot favourite among RGS girls, so we sold out very quickly. But while it was a good thing that everyone was in high spirits and we managed to finish selling all our stock, there were several things we realised we needed to improve on.

Our main problem that day was that because of the large crowd and our lack of organization, the sales were very messy and appeared unprofessional. Having been in OSL for a several months already, this is something that should have been avoided! So during our debrief, we talked about striving for quality in our service instead of being preoccupied by the amount of bubble tea we sell, and we will apply this to all future fundraising events.