Christmas Carnival- White Elephant Stall

Activity: Christmas Carnival- White Elephant Stall
Date: December 19, 2014 (Friday)
Time: 9 Hours
Type: Group (with friends)
Organization: School Event (donations to Operation Santa Claus)

Hours:  9 hours - Service

On December 19th, I helped out with our school's annual Christmas Carnival! Our class decided to do a White Elephant Stall, where we took second hand donations and sold them, and took all the money earned and donated it to Operation Santa

First, I stayed behind after school to help sort out the donations by how much we would sell them for. We had received donations ranging from children toys, bracelets, stuffed animals, coffee mugs, even a full set of the Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl book series.

I also made chocolate chip cookies for the Bake sale run by the year 13s (the day before the carnival).

Baking the cookies in my kitchen...

...and packaging them! (this took much longer than I thought it would...)

Bake sale!

My Cookies!

On the day, I helped set up the White Elephant Stall by organizing the things based on their price. As you can see we had lots of donations from our school!

(yes that is a full set of the Harry Potter, Eragon, Diary of the Wimpy Kid, Artimis Fowl  , Cherub series (including a few of the spin off!) )

The whole stall (it took several tables to put everything!)

Marking things for auction! (More info in reflections)

Passing an auction sheet over! (the green tag marks the current bid)

At the end of the day, our single stall raised HK$3,588!

The pile of tickets we got! ( each ticket is worth HK$ 2)

 Reflections HERE, since this post is getting a bit long... (sorry for the delay!)

- Rebecca 

Baking Workshop

Activity: Baking Workshop
Date: December 12, 2014 (Friday)
Time: 3 Hours
Type: Group (with friends)
Organization: Cake Cake Family (LINK)

Hours:  3 hours - Creative

On Friday, I went with a couple of my friends to a baking workshop in Tin Hao to learn how to bake chocolate cookies and cupcakes (and the icing that went on top of the cupcakes).

Learning outcomes:

4)Worked collaboratively with others 
While baking, I worked collaboratively with my friends to ensure that we put the correct amount of each ingredient. When one of us messed up and poured too much, we worked together to correct the mistake. We also split up the work between all of us, with some making the frosting while others helped to make the cupcakes, so that people weren't sitting around waiting for someone else to finish up a step.

Since the lady who was teaching us how to bake could only speak Cantonese, some of the better speakers translated the instructions into English so that we could follow. In this way, everyone was able to take part in the activity and no one was left out, meaning that in the end, we were all involved in making the cookies and cupcakes.

8)Developed new skills or increased expertise in an established area

 During the workshop, I increased my knowledge on how to make different baked goods and developed new skills on how to make frosting and cupcakes, since all the times I had made cupcakes or frosting in the past, I had "cheated" and used the box mix with store bought frosting.

I was actually surprised how easy it was to actually make cupcakes without the box mix, as I had always assumed it would be a very long complicated recipe and never bothered to learn. The same thing happened with the icing, which made me wonder why anyone would pay to buy the store bought icing instead of just doing it at home. I will definitely be making more baked treats in the future and improving my baking skills!

-Rebecca
             

School newspaper

Activity: School Newspaper
Date: Nov - December (Wednesday)
Time: 2 hours a week (4 times)
Type: Group (with the Newspaper ECA group)
Organization: School 

Hours:  6 hours - Creative
              2 hours - Service

Like with the music, since this club happens every week, I am going to just post regular updates each month, and then have a summary post at the end of CAS. Also this club started in October, but I didn't get my CAS form signed before then.. so I am going to start counting hours from November.

Since it is the first time our school has ever had a newspaper, we are trying to sort out everything. Right now everything has been posted, but the formatting is a bit off. 

We are also in the process of finding Chinese writers and translators for the site for our next issue, since our school is an International School and some students aren't able to read English as well. Plus it will give me a chance to practice my Chinese! 

Another thing we are looking toward in our next issue is more ways for other students to be involved in the newspaper, through drawing competitions, writing challenges etc. We would also like to give out house points to the winners of the competition, but haven't gotten the permission yet!

I helped write the Books vs Movies article, most of the world news and am in charge of the social media aspect of the newspaper. I also helped to organize the books, teacher interviews and games sections, as well as help format the sports page and house pages. Lastly, Tara and I edited though all of the submission we got from the younger years.
   Click Here to see our progress so far!

Hopefully our next issue will run more smoothly!

-Rebecca

Update 3

Here is where I'm at so far with CAS (and my blog):

I had to retype some of my previous posts, since they got deleted for some reason :( *, so there might be some changes from before. (they also have barely been edited, so they will change pretty frequently)

*Edit: Finally figured out why my posts keep being deleted. 
I have the blogger app on my phone, which has incomplete drafts of my posts (in particular the Ark Eden one- which is why it keeps changing so much!) Apparently it is set so it updates my blog with the phone version, so it keeps posting the incompleted drafts, making it look like parts of my posts just get deleted all of a sudden...

I also received the photos from the school camera from CAS week and am currently downloading photos from my phone, which I will start to place into some of my older posts, hopefully making them look less daunting and text heavy!

Still haven't written about baking class and Christmas carnival yet, that is on my to-do list at the moment (that and fixing my system of linking things together)!

Also, I am thinking about changing my CAS hour tally into a table or chart, since it isn't viewable at the moment on mobile and so I can have a clearer record on how I got the hours, not just a pure numerical value...

-Rebecca