International Day

    As one of our duties as the new year 12 students, this year it finally became our responsibility to organize the International Day in BIS3. Our class was divided into groups of 2, 3 or even 4 people, depending on the countries they are originally from and then each group had to choose a room, decorate it and come up with one or more suitable activities that they would do as their "station".
    I had two other people in my group - Polina Orlova and Alexandra Malanicheva and our station was called "Russian Federation". At the earliest stages of planning we had a lot of different ideas starting from decorating wooden Russian dolls (matryoshki) to cooking some traditional Russian food. Eventually, we've chosen a few ideas and started to develop them. The activities we came up with were fortune telling, flag nail art and face painting and a traditional Russian game that included throwing sweets wrappers on the table. In addition to that, we decided to meet each group of students with loud traditional Russian music, pies with meat and necklaces made out of pastry. Needless to mention, the walls of the business room were decorated with pictures of Russian painters, musicians, meals and fairytales heroes along with pictures of things that are associated with Russia.
    We were very nervous at the beginning, because to be honest it was our first experience of doing anything like that, however, when the first group of students came, the atmosphere became much more relaxed and fun, therefore we were enjoying every second of it.
    Our room was filled with laughter and positive emotions even on lunchtime, when some students come to get their face or nails painted. Some of the teachers (including Mr Gray, Mr English and Ms Merlet) came to get their nails painted while some people came because they heard that we had plenty of tasty food in our room, so hungry people were coming all the time.
    At the end of the activities, each student was asked to write their feedback on a piece of paper, so that in the future we would know about the improvements that could be made. Most of them said that they've had a lot of fun in our station and that our activities were original and very fascinating, however some students had mentioned that we could improve our station even more by bringing something to drink.



   Overall, I think our room was very successful in entertaining the students and, the most important of all, we've enjoyed every second of the International day!

   By organizing this activity, the following CAS outcomes were achieved:
       - Increased awareness of our strengths and areas for growth
       - Planned and initiated activities
       - Worked collaboratively with others
       - Showed perseverance and commitment
       - Developed new skills

Cooking Club

    One of the main things I did for the creativity aspect of CAS before Christmas were our cooking club sessions.
    First of all, I would like to thank Mr Gray, who kindly allowed us to use his chemistry lab during Monday lunchtimes for our club.
    Each weekend me and Karina spent some quality time trying to come up with new and original ideas for the meals that we could cook in school. Even though it sounds really easy - to choose and find a suitable recipe - it was quiet challenging at times since there was a limited amount of cooking utensils available in the chemistry lab - we had to use a bunsen burner, because it was the only way to boil even small amounts of water.
    Some of the things we've cooked over the first trimester were: Russian dumplings with meat and jam; pesto sauce and Korean rolls. I think the most challenging of all were the dumplings since they required some actual cooking. We used a bunsen burner to boil some water, however the pan turned out to be too small for all of them to fit in, so we had to cook them in small portions. Even though the dough turned out to be too thick and therefore wasn't really cooked properly, overall I was happy with the result and the people who came to the session seemed to be enjoying it. :)

Here are some pictures taken during the cooking club sessions. Furthermore, Karina has a video from the pesto session on her blog - http://karinasemochkinacas.blogspot.ru/2012/10/preparing-pesto-in-school.html

Henna tattoo

   Recently, I've found a few packs of henna paste that I bought from my summer holidays in Mauritius, so I decided to try my artistic skills and try to draw a henna tattoo on my hand. I've researched a few examples on the Internet to find some inspiration and finally started to draw. It turned out much harder than expected, because at first the lines turned out to be too thick and therefore unattractive. However - practice makes perfect, so after a few trials I was finally happy with the resulting drawing and decided to leave it as it is. In order to make it stay on the skin for longer I rubbed some oil into my skin before applying the paste and then sprayed in with hairspray after finishing drawing. Next time I will try to use a toothpick in order to make the drawing as detailed as possible. This is how it turned out to look:

I believe that during this activity I've achieved the following CAS outcomes:
 - Undertook new challenges
 - Developed new skills
 - Increased awareness of my strengths and areas for growth

Not posting anything lately :(

    To begin with, I would like to apologize for not posting any CAS related posts on my blog lately. To be honest, there were thousands of times when I was going to write something, though then I just couldn't think of anything good to write. However, I've done a lot of things for CAS since my last post, so all of them are going to be posted either today or over the next couple of days. :)