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.