Halloween Disco

Together with Alyona, Polina and Apolina, I was responsible for organizing the Halloween disco at our school. This post will be dedicated to describing my personal input into preparation for the event and to reflecting upon the actual event.

Plan:

We have made a plan beforehand on how we want the day to run. In general, this is what it looked like: 

Morning: collect money for non uniform day 

Break+Lunch: sell tickets for the disco 

Lunch: Halloween themed bake sale 

After school: Disco
Disco:

• snacks and drinks in the hall
• sushi bar in the economics room 
• activities 
• music and dancing in the hall 
• haunted room in the staff room 
• best costume nomination 
• best pumpkin nomination 

And this is what actually happened: 

Morning: Make people buy tickets for the disco. Uniform day cancelled. 

Break+Lunch: More pressuring into buying the tickets for the disco 

Lunch: Halloween themed bake sale 

After school: Disco
Disco:

• snacks and drinks in the hall
• sandwiches in Psychology
• one activity 
• music and dancing in the hall 
• no haunted room
• best costume nomination 
• best pumpkin nomination 

As you can probably tell, some things didn’t quite go the way we planned. Here’s why. 

It started all well with Polina and me making a list of all the responsibilities that needed to be taken by people involved in organization of the event. 

We have made a start on our own individual tasks. Problems started arising when I sent an email to Mr Cribb asking about the format of permission letters and it was left unanswered. This lead to us not being able to distribute the permission slips on the first day after the holiday. On that day Mr Cribb promised to write up the slip himself and he did. Except there was written that the day will be normal uniform day. Alyona and I knew that it was planned to be a non uni day so we decided to be proactive and attach an additional note to the letter, claiming that there has been a mistake and that students are allowed to wear their casual clothes. Both of the letters went out on Tuesday. We only then were told that it was decided not to have a non uniform day and we were told off. We had to send another letter saying that the day was in fact a normal uniform day. I thought that was absolutely not necessarily as I personally don’t see any problem in letting the students come in the clothes of their choice on such an occasion. Besides, it was a great opportunity to raise funding for charity. 

The sale of the tickets didn’t go very well, I was surprised that so many people in our school weren’t interested in coming. At one point someone even said “No one needs your disco”. I actually made me upset a little because we planned a lot of fun things for the event. Because of the lack of demand we had to cancel our idea about the haunted room because it wasn’t worth investing time to set it up for 3-5 people and we didn’t want to distract the people who actually got the tickets from dancing. Yes, we actually thought everyone will dance because this is what the discos are for! 

During the disco, a very little number of people danced. The majority sat in the corridors, or stood by the sides of the hall. I personally danced to every single song that was played that evening because I knew that if the dance floor would be empty, this would just signify a failure. This way in the beginning of the disco, only yr 13 and 12 girls danced, but then half way through it yr 12 girls thought that it was too boring for their presence and they left without saying a word to anyone. You’d be surprised, but I actually enjoyed the disco! At one point I stopped caring about all those people who paid 100 rubles to sit in the corridors and just had fun. The music was great along with the decorations and I love dancing! 

Moving on from the pessimistic points to more optimistic ones. What went well? A lot of things actually.

Firstly, the decorations. Alyona, Polinas and I all invested a lot of time into making and then decorating the school with spiders, bloodstains, cobwebs and balloons. The disco hall itself was quite spooky too with all the walls covered in black and burning pumpkins everywhere. 

Secondly, the bake sale during lunch was a huge success with us earning over 9000 rubles that is yet to be allocated for a good cause. Students and teacher complimented the majority of treats. 

Thirdly, the costumes. Despite the fact that people who came to the disco refused to dance, they were all dressed in amazing Halloween costumes, all different ones, and so carefully made especially for the event. I was truly happy to see them showing their support in that sense. 

Fourthly, some of the people actually enjoyed in disco. I think the reason why younger students did not dance was because they were very shy - that could have been the first disco that they ever attended so we can excuse them for that. Year 7-8 students came up to me saying they liked it and if at least one person had fun during the event, then it was worth organizing it! 

Like I said previously - I enjoyed preparing and initiating the Halloween Disco 2013 and I think that is what’s important for IB students with their CAS work - they should really enjoy the activities that they take part in. 

In addition, organizing this event, allowed me to: 

• increase awareness of my strengths and weaknesses
• undertake new challenges 
• plan and initiate a major project activity 
• work collaboratively with others
• engage with issues of global importance 
• consider ethical implications of my actions
• develop upon my organizational skills 

Homeless Project Update

I have mentioned in one of my previous posts that together with Polinas and Alyona, I have been working on a fund raising project to support the homeless in Moscow. This week, as an encouragement for people to donate money, we have set up a competition on which class would be able to collect the most coins. We decorated 7 bottles/jars with foil and numbers for each year group so that the students could drop their coins in. In the first couple of days the idea proved to be a success.

By the end of this activity we can proudly say that we’ve raised over 35000 rubles in coins. It’s incredible to think how a small donation from every student added up to that! 

I will keep posting about where and how that money was allocated in later posts. 

Cooking Club: Tartlets and Halloween Special

Alyona Suhkova and I continue to run cooking club every Monday at chemistry lab and teach students how to prepare various no heat dishes. 

Over the past two weeks we cooked two very unusual dishes. Last week it was Ginger and Grapes Tartlets and this week we made little monsters as a Halloween special. Frankly I’ve never cooked any of those so it was exciting for me to try to cook them too! 

Both of our cooking sessions went well but I realize that as more and more people become interested in the club, it becomes difficult to control everyone and make sure that they are following our instructions correctly. In addition, a major problem for us became buying all the ingredients for a growing number of people attending the club - it has simply become too expensive! 

Although I would really hate to limit the number of participants and to ask them for a financial contribution, I do not see any other choice for us. This is still under consideration. 

By continuing to run our cooking club, I: 

• increased awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of my activity
• planned and initiated activity 
• worked collaboratively with others 
• shown perseverance and commitment to cooking 
• considered ethical implications of my actions
• developed new skills 

More Capsules Recycled!

I’ll make this post short as it will be just an update on my recurring recycling activity. I continue to recycle my Nespresso coffee capsules and strongly encourage my friends and family to do the same. 

Here’s a shot I took before heading to the recycling point at Novinskiy Passazh:

By engaging with that eco friendly activity I have:

• shown perseverance and commitment in my recycling 
• engages with issues of global importance 
• considered ethical implications of my actions 

Cooking Club

One of the projects that I co-organized with Alyona Sukhova this year is the cooking club. The purpose of it is to teach other students in the school to cook various dishes that Alyona and I have mastered ourselves.

The club runs every Monday lunchtime in the Chemistry room and we have already organized two cooking sessions which I want to talk about in this post.

Last Monday we taught the students how to prepare Japanese sushi rolls and this Monday we cooked Tiramisu. We attempt to make our dishes as international as possible in order to maintain the international environment that is so valued in our school. The club proved to be a successful idea as a lot of people show up with great enthusiasm to create! I personally feel incredibly happy to be teaching useful skills to students and watch them really enjoy one of my all time favorite hobbies - cooking.

One of the difficulties that we were faced with is controlling what every single person in our "kitchen" is doing. Since a lot of students come to learn from us, it is troublesome to correct every single person if she/he is doing something wrong. However we have learned that explaining the process of cooking first and only then letting the students try it by themselves helps in eliminating mistakes and overall is a ,uch more convenient way of organizing our sessions.

In the closest future, Alyona and I are planning to extend our activity to creating a board in the school that we may use to display different recipes and the photos from our cooking sessions. I will be updating my CAS blog on the progress with that.

I think that cooking club is a great activity to run in our school and it enables me to:

- increase awareness of my strengths and weaknesses
- plan and initiate activities
- work collaboratively with others
- show perseverance and commitment to cooking
- consider ethical implications of my actions 

Project: Homeless

I have made a start on the second year of IB and although it will be much busier and harder than the first one, I do not intend on stopping to care about CAS. 

Together with Polina Orlova and Polina Semochkina, we have organized a charity project for which we encourage students and teachers to donate money to purchase bread for homeless people or bring in any warm clothing that we could also give to those in need. 

The idea to organize such activity was born from everyday observation of homeless in the streets of Moscow. I have researched different organizations who specialized their work on   helping the homeless and found “Ruka Pomoschi” (Helping Hand). This non-profit organization works in different fields: supports shelter homes that gives sleeping places to homeless, collects food and clothing for both adult and child homeless, organizes feeding time every Monday and Friday at 19:30 near Kurskiy train station - anything that would relief the plight that some of Moscow citizens find themselves in. The aim of our school is to assist this organization in it’s good doings. 

There were several things that needed to be done in order to start the project: a large poster to identify the place of collection, several smaller posters to hang around school, a large box for collecting clothing, two jars for collecting money and letters for tutors. My personal task was to make a large poster and find a box. In addition, Polina S and I wrote a letter addressed to all students as an encouragement. 

We have been running this activity for a whole week and it has already proven to be a success. I intend on continuing it at least until half term, maybe for a whole first term. After this we will give all the funds raised and clothing collected to “Puka Pomoschi” and will produce a presentation to demonstrate to students the results of out work and their contribution. 

I believe that this project is a truly valuable one as it aims to support people who need it the most. Moreover it enables me to target the following CAS outcomes: 

- planning and initiating activities 
- working collaboratively with others
- showing perseverance and commitment in my activities
- engaging with issues of global importance 
- considering ethical implications of my actions 

“Persons who have been homeless carry within them a certain philosophy of life which makes them apprehensive about ownership.” - Jerzy Kosinski 

Yoga away from home

For this summer holiday my family chose to go to Spain. We travelled along the coast, visiting Barcelona and Valencia, and then settled down in a small town of Albir for 10 days. During those 10 days I've realized that I have been missing my yoga practices so I set myself a target to find a yoga center to continue my practices away from home.

Nearby the apartment that we were renting I was lucky to find an absolutely wonderful yoga center with most beautiful halls I've ever had a chance to practice at. I have had four practices during our stay with two different teachers and it was fascinating to me how their methods of teaching differed so much between each other and to what I was used to with my teacher in Moscow. I have learned that there are different types of mudra and that you can build up your practice solely through a series of Sun Salutation variations and that some teachers choose not to follow the chakra method that I am used to (although my teacher taught me that going up or down the chakras is the only correct way of practicing yoga). In short, I have realized that the art of yoga can be pursued in various different ways. I was also able to develop my strength and flexibility from frequent yoga practices.

In addition to that, I:
- shown perseverance and commitment to yoga
- developed new skills