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

Recycling Capsules. Literally.

About a week ago, my dearest friend and an IB student Polina Orlova told me that I can directly recycle my Nespresso capsules at one of their stores. As a very proactive recycler I got very excited about this and called up Nespresso stores in Moscow asking whether I can really do so. It is really possible!

Today I went to Nespresso "boutique" at Novinskiy Passazh and gave away a whole bag of capsules. The lady at the store kindly explained to me the whole process of recycling and shared with me some of Nespresso's plans for the future, that is so recycle coffee machines too. She also offered me a free cup of delicious cappuccino which was ultra nice of her to do!

As well as indulging myself with coffee drinking I:
- considered ethical implications of my actions
- increased awareness of issues of global importance
- shown perseverance and commitment to recycling

Summer Charity Work + Recycling

Summer holidays have started but this does not mean that CAS is over. At least for me it doesn't. On the last day of school, Mrs Gray gave to me all the money that was raised from the summer fair and asked me to allocate it for a good cause. 

Today has been a very busy CAS day for me. In the morning, I called up the owner of the "Call of the wild" dog shelter that we have visited in december and asked her of things that were in urgent necessity. I also persuaded her to let us come to the shelter today, on Tuesday, since the visiting days was the weekend. Firstly, together with Alyona, Polina and my little brother, I went to Ashan and bought a whole bunch of things that were needed. 

The "bunch of things" consisted of: 

- 10kg of dry food

- 12 packs of buckwheat 

- 30l of drinking water 

- 15 cans of conserved food

- 40 bottles of antiseptic 

- 10 tubes of healing cream 

We then travelled to the shelter and passed all of that to the shelter keeper. We chatted for a while with her whilst my brother played with dogs. 

After waving farewell to poor dogs, I came home and had some rest and then, together with Polina only this time, we headed to the main office of the charity "Podari Zhizn'" (eng. "Gift a Life"). Polina has done some extensive research on different charity organizations and it was her who introduced me to "Podari Zhizn'". This organization mainly focuses on supporting children with cancer. Knowing the biology behind it, for me, cancer is an absolute tragedy and dealing with it is a life long struggle. It breaks my heart to know that many children have to go through it today. 

This is why I was very interested in "Podari Zhizn'" and have researched it a lot. On their website I have found a telephone number that I called today to ask about donation procedure. We were almost late but made it in the last minute. We have donated 20'000 rubbles and surprisingly it was all done very formally. We signed an official contract with the director of the organization and I thought it was a perfect evidence of CAS. I will hand the hard copy of the contract to Mr Short but I am also posting a picture in this post. 

I finished the day off with some recycling action. I have recently found out that there were several 

points in Moscow where you can sort your garbage at 24/7. If this interests you, those are your destinations:

- Sadovnicheskiy, 11

- Tatarskaya, 7

- Klimentovskiy, 6

- Ovchinikovskaya, 24/22

- Kozhevnicheskaya, 1

- Melninskiy, 6

- Talalihina, 2/1

- Tovarisheskiy, 1

- 1st Siromyatnicheskiy, 3a

As a lot of people probably know, I am huge fan of water and I drink over 6 litters of it daily. Thus it only took me a couple of days to get a whole stock of plastic water bottles that I readily recycled today at one of those spots. 

To wrap this all up, I would like to say that today has been a great day because working for a good cause, whether it is helping people or caring for environment, feels amazing. I hope that in the future there will be more people in this world who would choose to live in a collective conscious way. 

CAS Objectives: 

- planning and initiating activities

- woking collaboratively with others

- showing perseverance and commitment to my activities 

- engaging with issues of global importance 

- considering ethical implications of my actions

Crocheting

One of activities that I mentioned in my new CAS plan was learning to crochet. This is a very babushka style activity but I thought it'd be really cool to know at least the basics of it!

To pursue that activity I have started by watching various videos of Youtube and researching different styles and advice for beginners. After this I have prepared the yarn and the hook and got straight into it. 

The pictures illustrate my practicing crochet and a little final project in a form of an imaginary monster. I genuinely enjoyed learning to crochet because it was something that I have never done before and didnt think I would do either. In addition, there were several CAS outcomes met:

- increasing awareness of strengths and weaknesses

- undertaking new challenges 

- developing new skills 

Also, if you are reading this post and thinking this could be an activity for you, I strongly recommend this video to watch: 

Donations to School 4

To start off, I would like to apologize for not posting for over a month - it's been a busy month and I could not find time to post on my CAS blog. This, though, does not mean that I haven't been doing any CAS activities. 

One of those activities was collecting donations to BIS4. For their summer fair, held on 20th of June, all parents were asked to bring in any books and toys in good condition to sell at a second hand stall. My parents are too busy to find time to look for anything, so I decided to use this as a CAS opportunity. I have search our apartment for anything that could be worthy of selling, asked my brother if he didnt mind giving that away and sent that off to BIS4. 

I thought that it was a great idea to organize such activity because the funds collected from selling those second hand items were given to an orphanage and I was glad I had a chance to participate in it. 

I have targeted some of CAS outcomes as well, including engaging with issues of global importance and considering ethical implications of my actions. 

Art Fair @ School9

About a week ago we were informed about the art fair at British International School 9. Our art teacher, Ms Platt, asked me to find volunteers to take part in that event. I approached every single person in our class during tutor time and made a list of all people who were willing to participate.


After this I decided not to stop on this single task that was asked of me and took the whole organisational process on myself. This involved several group social network chats where I explained to everyone all the details of the event that I first had to ask Mrs Platt about. I also answered any further questions that have occurred. In addition to that I was responsible to manage the teaching of over 100 children in 2h 30 minutes. We made that possible by me recording the activities of every person involved and grouping them togethr to take up all the time and not run over it. Finally, I made a list of supplies needed to run each activity and took care of permission slips to leave school. I personally distributed and collected all of them.

I believe that I have made a tremendous impact into organisation of this event and it definitely paid off. Everyone, both Yr12 students and kids of school 9, enjoyed the activities which they were involved in and overall the day was a big success!

Together with Alyona Sukhova we were teaching children how to decorate picture frames with pasta and beans. The excitement of theirs was priceless! I fully and truly enjoyed working with Yr2s and 4s.

On a side note, I am very much lost in what to do in life (profession wise) and participation in today's event got me thinking that maybe a job of primary teacher is for me? We'll just have to wait a couple more years to find out!

CAS Objectives:

- planning and initiating activities
- working collaboratively with others
- considering ethical implications of my actions
- developing new skills 

ReCapsule #2: Soil Fertilizer

Since 8th of March I have been growing baby oranges on my window sill. After a week after the purchase the tree started to wither and I decided to start fertilizing the soil to trigger fast healthy growth. Instead of using chemical fertilizers I went for natural coffee grounds.

As my ReCapsule project #2 I have been extracting coffee grounds from already used Nespresso capsules, collecting them into a bag and fertilizing the soil for my orange tree every second day.

The results were marvelous. After two weeks I started noticing new flowers appearing and my room quickly filled with heavenly smell of orange blossom.

In the end of the day, I not only saved my tree from drying out but also engaged with issues of global importance by preferring a more eco-friendly fertilization. 

Nespresso Project #1: Photo Board

As my first ReCapsule (recycling capsules, duh) project I have chosen a photo board decoration. For my father's birthday my sister and I have prepared a hand made present which looked like this:

As you may see the photos seem to be attached by empty Nespresso capsules. I thought that it looked very original and it was a great combination of creativity and service in one CAS activity. I am also convinced that if dad hangs this board in his office, all of the people who would come there would see it and hopefully realize that it is possible to re-use pretty much anything to improve Earth's ecology! 

In addition to raising awareness of issues of global importance I have:

- undertaken a new challenge 

- worked collaboratively with others

- considered ethical implications of my actions

- developed new skills 

Teaching Russian Idioms

Today as on any other Thursday I had a Russian lesson with Mme Merlet. I have decided to do something completely different to what we did previously and teach Madame some Russian idioms that she can learn by heart and use in her everyday speech. For that purpose I made a presentation with pictures describing the literal meaning of the phrase and it's idiomatic one.

We had do much fun when Madame was guessing the meaning of phrases! It's great to realize that activities can be both fun and CAS appropriate since I:

- planned and initiated activities
- showed perseverance and commitment to tutorship
- considered ethical implications of my actions 

Updated CAS Plan

The term is over and I have reached the majority of my goals. This is why I thought I should change my CAS activities and set different goals.

Creativity.

1. Crocheting.
As much as it is perceived to be a very old-lady-in-a-wheel-chair activity, crocheting has been something that I wanted to learn how to do. Last weekend I have visited a local crafts shop and purchased a crocheting hook and some yarn to start working promptly. I will be mastering this skill every saturday evening for half an hour at least and attempt to crochet something. I can not yet predict what it will be but I am hoping to become clear on that once I get to know the skill better.

2. Piano Playing.
This is an activity that I decided to continue to pursue. Last term the outcome was not incredibly impressive as I had some issues with the piano that I talked about in previous posts. This term I will be working collaboratively with my sister Polina to produce a piano cover for a beautiful song "Let her go" by Passenger.

Action.

1. Bike-Riding.
Last term I have been regularly attending gym practices and will not stop doing that in the future. However I really wished to take advantage of warm weather and to move away from jogging on a treadmill inside to bike riding at Bitzevsky park in my neighborhood. My goal is to constantly work on increasing the distance travelled in one bike journey.

2. Yoga.
I have been practicing yoga for a long period of time already and I have no intention to stop where I am. I will continue to attend practices every Sunday and work towards developing skills in order to be able to intermediate asanas. I shall post evidence of my progress in future posts.

Service.

1. Tutoring Russian.
Just as I was doing since september, this term I will continue to help Mme Merlet with her learning of Russian language. This is something that I have enjoyed doing before and the fact that our lesson take place during Thursday lunchtime, this activity is perfectly convenient for me to do.

2. Recycling Nespresso Capsules.
We drink a lot of coffee in my family and our first choice is capsuled coffee by Nespresso. I have been noticing that a lot of raw materials that are used to produce those capsules go to waste after coffee as been drenched from them. Of course, this is awfully environmentally not friendly. I decided that as one of my service activities for this term would be to recycle coffee grounds/capsules as much as I possibly can. 

Academic Honesty Video: process+evaluation+final work

For the past three weeks Alyona Sukhova, Polina Orlova and I have undertaken a new challenge by collaboratively working on a short video for the Academic Honesty contest. The showing is in the past and I would like to reflect on the process of making the video and the evaluation of my peers in this post. 

The idea of making a voice over for famous celebrities came to us very quickly and we went with it because we thought it was creative and original. And as my classmates noted, it was. 

To start off I went home and downloaded several videos off youtube for further editing. It was a new skill for me as I have never downloaded videos off internet before. After this Polina and I watched through all of the videos and picked out sections that we wished to include in the video. We were looking for sections with a lot of gestures but not obvious mouth movements. Then we brainstormed ideas that we would want to include into the video and wrote out lines that our celebrities could say. The only thing left to do was to record the lines and layer them over muted video sections. Easier said than done. We had to record over and over again for the voice to match the picture and it was so exasperating at times, I just wanted to give up on this! But I didnt. We then used GarageBand (a mac app) to experiment with different pitches of voice (afterall, we couldnt have Bieber and Queen Elizabeth talking in the same Karina’s or Polina’s voice!) FInally the voice overs are all done.

Originally, we planned on purely using voice overs and video clips to construct our film from but then we came up with a more original idea and that is a news program. We presented celebrity clips as sections from interviews with them that we ourselves took. Polina and I had to use our drama skills to play roles of professional news reporters whilst Alyona was doing the camera work. 

Once the video was all done, I spent some quality time editing it. In the end as an amusing little extra we decided to include outtakes from the video. 

I have posted the final project on YouTube:

Overall the video was a great success. During evaluation session our video was viewed first and Mr Gray noted that he felt sorry “for everyone else who had to go after us”. It was a great deal of praise for us. Others thought that our video was very relevant to the topic, original and creative. 

However, there was a huge problem with our work. It did not match one of the main contest requirements which stated that all materials, whether is it audio or video, should represent the author’s original work. 

It was a great shame and for the future, I will make sure to keep close attention to requirements for the work. 

Achieving my Goals

In my CAS plan for spring term I have set myself several goals that I have managed to achieve. In this post I intend to explain how and why did I reach (or did not reach) my targets.

Creativity:

I promised myself by the end of three months I will learn how to play a piano piece from the musical "Once". I was encountered by some serious difficulties with this activity because the piano that I had intended to use for practices was broken by my brother and had to be repaired. This took over a month of my practice time and when we got the piano back, there were still some notes that were slightly off. Well, they still are. Hence I was only able to learn how to play the left hand chords. This is my prove of that:

My sister was familiar with the song so we formed a duet. This has not been the first time that we have worked collaboratively with each other and I am very grateful to her for helping me out with my activity and developing a new skill.

My other creativity target was to finish off an A3 piece of art. This was definitely a new challenge that I had to undertake but I have successfully managed to do that! Here is what the final piece looks like:

Action: 

I have been training at Kimberly Land sports center for the whole term. To prove this I have been making the use of an app called Foursquare. In short, it is an application that enables you to 'check in' at places that you visit. It tells you how many times you have been to a particular place and enables you to earn badges for frequent visits. According to Foursquare I have checked in Kimberly Land 25 times for the past 3 months.

25 times makes at least 8 times per month on average and twice a week. My perseverance and commitment to gym trainings enabled me to reach the 5km goal that I have set. 

I must admit that I had to alter my trainings every time I visited gym because I always ended up exhausted after 4km or so thus reflecting upon my strengths and weaknesses. I have researched various breathing techniques and regularly trained to get to my goal. 5km may not seem as a startling accomplishment but for me personally it was a great success.
Today, panting and red-faced, I have jogged 5.02km in 29 minutes and 28 seconds.

Another action goal for this term was to be able to hold my breath underwater for 40 seconds. I have restarted swimming at the pool after figuring a way to combat over dryness of my skin and now I am able to swim underwater for 40 seconds exactly without gasping for O2 by the end of it. This is also a very significant achievement for me because I can get extremely claustrophobic especially when I concentrate on that absence of oxygen. Luckily, I found my way around this and after regular practices in the bath tub at home and in the pool I have reached my target.

My final action goal was to be able to do some of Intermediate level yoga asanas. I have also managed to do that and here are some of the poses that I am not able to do:

Tree Pose (Vrksasana) Lotus Squat Variation

Bound Angle (Baddha Konasana)

One Legged King Pigeon (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana)

Service:

One of my service activities for the term was paper recycling. I have been doing it for the first term but failed to follow my plan this time around. However I believe that I managed to compensate this failure by getting involved in various other service activities.
These include:
1. Donating my old clothing and shoes to a less fortunate family in Troitskoe village:

2. Allocating the capital raised from this term's fundraisers and then producing and presenting a video to KS3 students as a sign of gratitude for supporting our activities:

3. Continuing to tutor Mme Merlet and helping her to learn Russian
4. Participating in a number of fundraisers and service activities including the winter day, the bake sale, Valentines disco, science fair at school 4, etc. All of those required me engaging with issues of globan importance and considering the ethical implications of my actions and the evidence for those may be found in my previous posts. 

Crazy Hair Day @ BIS 4

Crazy Hair Day was held today at British International School of Moscow. It was a really fun, out of ordinary event that allowed me to unleash my creativity and support my good friend Julien Caron who was responsible for organizing it. 

Together with Alyona Sukhova we took inspiration from one of pop icon Lady Gaga's music videos - "Telephone". The concept of our hair style was to roll sections of hair onto coke cans and as impossible as it sounds at first, in reality making such hair style only takes 3 cans of coke (empty cans are strongly advisable), 9 hair clips of your hair color (we had to paint ours), 30 minutes of your morning routine and loads and loads of hair spray to keep your "curls" intact. 

At first I was doubting our idea but then, motivated by peculiarity of the hair-do and the prize for the best hair style, we went for it. This is what I looked like for the entire day in school: 

People at school responded very well to our creativity - I had a lot of people approaching me with compliments. We won the contest and I am glad that I have overcome the fear of public humiliation which was definitely a challenge for me.