CAS Plan

In order to meet my CAS requirement I must spend time in achieving the three main goals - Creativity, Action and Service (The components of CAS). This is what I will do in order to meet both the components and the learning objectives of CAS.
Creativity - This term I will be doing quite a lot of work on the house score boards, especially (and probably only for my team) Right now I am working on a piece of urban artwork - Graffiti tags. This tag shows the name of our team in our favourite colours and possibly fonts. I plan to take part in all activities in school as well, examples may include... International Day, Sports Day, Discos and so on. However at times this may be impossible do to a great passion of mine shown just below.
Action - My passions lie with sports especially hockey, which I practised everyday for the last 11 years or so, I have a lot of action in my life and I will continue to endure the challenges it will put on me this new hockey season. I have always wished to take part in extracurricular activities and, after I actually receive a diploma from my hockey school I will move on to do another sport, which most likely will be either football or rugby.
Service - This may become a problematic area if not attended, but I am still quite keen in helping clean the world by helping to recycle materials from school along with my friends and fellow classmates. We might try to help the local Green Peace by helping saving Bitsevski Park from the flow of rubbish. Someone has put forward the idea of visiting a local orphanage (a great idea in my opinion) and help them by organizing activities and/or lessons, but I fear this will be extremely hard to organize.

This is basically my plan for this term, I hope to accomplish all of these tasks I have put in front of myself and, although this may seem quite the challenge, I am ready to take it on.

Sports Day

Although sports day started on thursday we spent the start of wednesday preparing our houses for the oncoming competitions. I am the vice-captain of the green house and as a result some preparation was shifted onto me. The year 12 group (that means us) worked collaborately in order to get everything prepared for the next day.
Sports Day finally came the prepared activities and sports tested us to our limits we  worked together in  order to obtain the maximum amount of house points for our houses. As a result we increased our awareness of our own strengths and weaknesses, as well as undertaken new challenges, an example will include "Safety" we developed new skills and strategies in order to win as many challenges as possible. A enormous part of my life goes towards professional sports and I was more than happy to participate in athletics and sports. After football, dodgeball, basketball, "Safety", volleyball ad an awful amount of laps around the school we finally reached the finale of the day... The rallies. Although the activity is fairly simple,adrenaline levels in the blood go sky high and it tests physical strength extremely well, it increases their awareness of their strengths and weaknesses. After the interhouse competitions, the IB students raced against the teachers and, well, we got disqualified after beating the teachers by half a lap.
Generally the day passed fairly well everyone enjoyed it and I hope to plan and initiate activities in the near future. Today we have not nescessarily shown perseverance in our activities, but Hockey will (an entry will come every half-term).   

Hockey - Week 1

My eleventh year of hockey, and a new season begins in parallel with the new school year, sadly it is my last season, afterwards we must either continue our training in other clubs or simply move on and this is what I decided to do. From day one we get into a tough training schedule and this week we focus on athletics in it's lightest forms - running cross-country runs, jumping in height and length and sprinting. We all developed new skills and undertaken new challenges, it increased our awareness of our strengths and weaknesses, the places that need improvement. However our on-land training takes up just over an hour daily, while the whole session takes up just under 3 hours...
The rest of the time we spend on ice it may look like we are professionals, but we still have lots to learn, when on ice we increase our awareness of our strengths and weaknesses (although this sometime may be a rather verbally painful experience), of course we train aspects of each individual, but the collaborative effort we put in as a team is what gets victories in the ice clashes. For many years we have practised our skills, which at first seemed new at the time, however now it is a routine. Since we are the eldest year group we must set an example to the rest of the club's players and from time to time we plan and initiate activities for the small ones. This week we organized a small tournament between the years 1996 and 1997, as well as for the 2000th and 2001st year group. On thursday we organized sports activities like football, basketball and volleyball, the teams had fun and were happy to do something on land that did not involve running hundreds of laps or jumping over barriers.
The week came to it's conclusion on Sunday, this is when our training is put to the test - The Moscow Cup Tournament. We demonstrated good passing movements and teamwork and in the end we finished the game with a score of 8:1. Next week will not be so easy our opponents, too, won their first game and their last year's statistics were generally pretty good. There is no telling what will happen on the ice and what our coach might think of next...
This part of the whole blog will be updated each half term, i'll try to update photos and my statistics.

The First Day Back

The first day back at school, but there is no time to waste, the IB starts today and that means a very tough two years ahead of us - the new year 12 group. After a brief speech from our headmaster we went straight to our activities, which aimed at improving our teamwork and, in point of view, succeeded in it's primary task. It all started from planning and building a tower from a very limited supply of straws and paper and it enabled us to attempt to work collaboratively with others, putting together our ideas and executing together. Although it might seem slightly childish it allows us to both develop new skills and the undertaking of new challenges, the activity itself was fun, it is a shame it was limited to only ten minutes. As we went along the different activities prepared for us by the elders in year 13, we noticed that activities prepared were continuing to get more and more challenging, until we reached the point where we were blind folded and told to work as a team by communicating in order to make different geometric shapes using the five metre rope given. This was a challenging activity, but a very interesting one, I now understand that many objectives may not be reached when working alone, but may become easy tasks if working with others. Another activity that I found interesting was to protect an egg, which is thrown from a three metre height by only using the materials provided. Sadly we failed to protect the egg in the end, but no worries, since now we know that our strategy was not so good as it seemed and maybe, if we get another chance, we will use our previous experience.
The main activity of the day was the kite building activity, where we again demonstrated our teamwork as we worked in groups of three in order to make an actual flying model of a kite. At that moment we were given some light sticks as well as duck-tape, string and a plastic garbage bag and were set straight to work after some tips given by the year 13s. However our group decided to make a small risk, the kite was meant to be a cross, but we made it into a diamond shape with a cross inside it, we increased the mass of the kite and were now afraid that it would not lift off the ground. Throughout the one hour period given we were able to construct a kite and after a break we actually got to fly then out on a plain. There was not much wind that day, therefore we could no lift our kites into the air, although we were happy to see that the kite, after several failed attempts (some of which were quite close to getting the kite up and flying), still held in one piece. We were glad to take part in this activity, the whole group seemed to felt very happy, since we spent the day on activities, learning about CAS through actions, instead of never ending lectures. I learned that even kite-making could actually be turned into activities that could help other children and people in general. Anyone can take any experience from their life and turn it to a service to help others.
In just one day I have undertaken some new challenges and definitely developed a new skill - kite-buiding, something I have never done. I believe I did show commitment in the activities, however I might need to learn to work a bit more collaboratively. I hope to go on to plan my own activities and execute them fairly soon.