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