Katies' blog

October 2008

It has been a busy couple of weeks. I have

• passed my archery course
• been to a council meeting
• bought a bow
• run a band evening at the local venue
• and had to do lots of school work!

The fun doesn't stop here it just keeps coming.

This weekend I am involved at rehearsals at my one of the local churches and have a party to go to. Schoolwork is piling up yet again and wonder sometime how I manage to get it all done. The weekend just gone was brilliant. I passed my archery course which means I can now go and become a club member and go on to teach at the local Scout Camp. With this I decide it was time to buy a bow (recurve) so I headed on down to the shop and spent three hours deciding on all the different parts I needed. It ended up that I spent 450 on a state of the art carbon fibre bow. At the moment it is only 22pound draw, so I will have to keep swapping the limbs but that won't cost anything extra.

From there I went straight on to help out at The Berko-Tring Thing. This is an event that the youth town council had set up so we were there to make sure everything run smoothly (which it did). It was a night for acoustic performances which meant we had a lot of singers. The main aim was to get more teenage girls involved as none really go for The Battle of the Bands which is in December.

Yesterday I had a lot of decision to make. Do I go to the council meeting or should I go to my RE thing which takes us through the extra bit of the GCSE? Luckily I only have to make this decision once a month. I went to the council meeting which was the right choice as we had very large discussion about our school being changed into Vertical Tutoring. Now it sounds like a great thing but the main aim is student voice and since the head has arrived we have had no student voice because she simply doesn't listen to our ideas. Most of the other points she makes are already in place at school as well so were not really sure what's going on so we have arranged a meeting with the Deputy. So we will see.

A fire broke out at school today (2nd time in five years!) One of the year 9 classes were doing an experiment which caused an explosion sending our science department up in flames. As far as we know there wasn't too much damage, however they have had to shut the department down for the time being.

I have been out at Guides and we made sock puppets which they all seemed to enjoy. Next week they have to perform plays in their patrols (I wonder what they have come up with?) I also had to give advice to one Guide who is having trouble at school. We are at the same school so I am able to tell her about different things that go on at school, like Peer Support. I do this quite often with the younger Guides and they really appreciate it.

As well as all this I have just signed up to do something called Slum Survivor. This is where I get sponsored (the money goes to Tearfund) to live with some other people from my church to live in a makeshift house with materials we find round town. We are set tasks to earn food and cooking equipment. It will be a good experience but i'm not so sure about the  two days with no washing facilities!