28 Feb, 2012 (swimming)

Today we have a terrible thunder storm. It is impossible to swim in this condition thus I will continue my swimming activity on Thursday.

26 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

Today, I reflected on what I have learned with my teacher for these 12 meetings. He seems satisfied that I have remembered all of the skills he have taught me and he hopes that I will continue on learning on how to cook properly in the future.

25 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

For my last dish, I was taught a pretty complicated meal. It was pan fried chicken. I did not learn on how to clean the chicken as my skill is not sufficient but I was taught on how to season it. It was complicated since it requires so many stages to be able to cook this meal. Frying one whole chicken is a lot easier by using a two sided pan and it also reduces oil jumping around everywhere. It tastes really nice and I hope I can make it by myself next time.

23 Feb, 2012 (Swimming)

Today, I will try another 60 lapses since I still think that 60 lapses is a challenge for me especially I try to swim within a time constraint. I succeeded but I feel really tired afterwards. I know my limit and I will still do 60 lapses for the next meeting. I have really realize that swimming is a very good and fun way to do sports. I have never been really into swimming before but because I'm doing this activity for several weeks now, I realize that this activity is very fun and useful. It is really fun to swim with friends yet at the same time enhance our skills.

21 Feb, 2012 (Swimming)

Today, my goal is to swim without pauses for 2 hours. I reach 40 lapses in no time and I realize that my breath is not as hard as before which means, my lungs have gotten better from swimming. I realize that swimming have made myself healthier. Then, after several minutes, I have reached 60 lapses! It is a huge improvement for me and I'm so proud of myself. I have to admit that swimming without pauses is really hard but I feel a high sense of achievement. I hope that for the next meeting, I will be able to do better.

19 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

Today, my teacher and I went to the market to choose fruits. He told me on how to pick good fruits and then when we went home, we make some fuit juices mixed with honey since honey is a lot healthier compared to sugar. I made apple and melon juice.

18 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

To actually apply my knowledge on how to handle shrimp, I’m going to make another shrimp dish. The dish is is shrimp with fermented soybean. It was hard and took so much time on peeling the shrimp one by one but other than that, the dish is pretty simple and I’m confident that I can make it. The most important thing in this dish is to control the fire level so that the shrimp is not under or overcooked.

16 Feb, 2012 (Swimming)

To cover Tuesday's failure in reaching 50 lapses, I will succeed in reaching 50 lapses this time. I'm so determined and I have high confidence that I will be able to reach that goal. As I swim, I didn't realize that I have reached 50 lapses. Since I try to swim without any pauses, I reach 50 lapses in no time. I have realized that my swimming skill is getting better and I feel less fatigue compared to the first time I started this activity. Today, I undertake a new challenge and have succeeded in accomplishing it.

14 Feb, 2012 (Swimming)

To enhance my skill, I will try swimming 50 lapses today. I believe that I can do it since last time when I did 40 lapses, it feels 'easy'. I want to try new challenges but when I reach 40 lapses, it starts to rain badly. It was impossible for us to swim so we wait for several minutes and it doesn't get better. So my friends and I decided to stop swimming and will try it next week. This is the problem in swimming outdoor. The weather here at Sentul is not predictable and I usually swim after school when it gets breezy and will usually rain in the evening. But it was nice since at least I have reached 40 lapses today. I will try again on Thursday to be able to swim 50 lapses.

12 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

According to the plan, I’m going to make onde today. My whole family helped and it was so fun. The challenge in making this dish is when I have to insert grounded peanuts inside the onde balls. Sometimes, the ball breaks and I have to redo everything. In making this dish, we also need patience as it took a long time to create the onde balls one by one. Another thing to point out is, my teacher said that it is will be better to put jelly powder mixed with flour so that the onde is more chewy and ‘clean’. We had so much fun making it and afterwards, all of us enjoy it together.

11 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

Today, my teacher and I spent several hours in buying the ingredients for tomorrow’s dish. We are planning to cook ‘onde’ and buy the flour, peanuts, red sugar and other ingredients for the dish. This disn will takes time as we will personally make the onde balls one by one. My family will help me tomorrow.

9 Feb, 2012 (Swimming)

Today is my second meeting for this swimming activity. After experiencing body ache last time, I feel like I should try harder than my friends. I realize that my skills are not that good but I will try my best to achieve a specific goal in this activity: to be able to swim faster and will gradually increase the lapses each week. Because I am short in time, I have to do this activity twice a week starting from next week. Today, I did another 40 lapses. I still feel very tired but I realize that it wasn't as bad as last time. My body does not ache as bad as last week and I think this is a huge improvement. This means that my body have adjusted to this activity and I will start increasing the number of lapses next week.

5 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

Today, I’m going to learn a new skill on how to prepare shrimp. My teacher is planning to cook steamed shrimp. It was pretty simple but it requires a lot of work to clean the shrimp and there are tricks as to how steam the shrimp so that it doesn’t loses its fresh-ness. Today’s meeting wasn’t as challenging as the previous weeks but I still believe that today’s skill is very useful in the future.

4 Feb 2012 (Cooking Lesson)

To apply my cutting lesson last week, today’s menu would be tempe with garlic. This is a very simple and an Indonesian dish. It also has a very strong garlic taste to it and requires many cutting to do. Since I’ve learned on how to slice garlic into several pieces last time, it didn’t took me long to finish the dish.

Feb 2, 2012 (Swimming)

Today will be my first swimming activity and it has been forever since the last time I swam. I realize that my swimming skill have decreased as i feel very hard to even reach 40 lapses. I have body ache and a cramp at first. My friends did really well and I feel that I need to improve my swimming skill so that I can swim faster and get healthier. From this meeting, I have realize my areas for growth and I have undertaken new challenges. I have also shown perseverance as it was really hard to reach 40 lapses but I continue until I succeeded. I realize that swimming would make myself healthier and for me to be able to commit to my activity.

Swimming

My new CAS activity: Swimming
Here are the learning outcomes that I'm going to achieve:
Increased awareness of my strengths and areas for growth: Swimming activity will increase my awareness of my skill to swim. These pass few years, I have never fully realize on what style of swimming that I’m good at and now, I’m willing to learn new styles and have a healthier body.

Undertaken new challenges: swimming is a new challenge for me. Even though I can swim, but I haven’t got the opportunity to learn other styles of swimming. To learn these new styles, it is a challenge for me.

Shown perseverance and commitment in their activities: This activity will show my perseverance by: in swimming practices, we will swim continuously and without commitment and perseverance people would probably quit because of boredom. I will continuously challenge myself and show perseverance in this activity.

Developed new skills: I will develop new skills by learning different styles of swimming. These years, I know only 2 styles but I’m eager to learn more.