A morning of reflection

Hello all.

For some reason I spent this morning feeling a little reminiscent. So much so that I wound up making some collages that I will now share with you. If, by any chance, you actually happen to follow my little blog (I thank you greatly), I thought you might like to get a little picture of my life from before I entered the world of blogging.
The pictures have a range of 1997 right up to 2013, although I am lacking quite a few years as both my PC and my external hard drive died a while back and I lost most of my pictures, I am slowly rebuilding the catalogue from Facebook though - thank god I have such a tendency to upload pictures from trips!
Anyway, here's the collage named "Then & Now"



























In the first picture I'm sitting with my cousin, I lived with my aunt for a while after my mothers death so my dad could work without having to fork out for child are, and to give him a chance to grieve without me being a pain, I kid, I was actually very good as a baby, Dad says I barely cried, just sat quietly and as a toddler I never threw tantrums, just looked at books or played on my own, maybe being an only child I just didn't develop that arguing streak haha!

The second picture is my nursery picture, taken when I was 3 (everyone in my psychology class estimated my age to be 9...either they were VERY baby faced at 9, or I was very mature at 3....) after a trip to Disneyland Florida - I'm wearing a mickey mouse top. :)

The 3rd picture was taken at the end of year 2, aged 7, before making our way to year 3, in the scariest part of the school - JUNIOR SCHOOL!! (at this point, my primary school was a JMI school, we later changed to a primary.)

And finally the 4th picture, taken in my friends garden just before going to our year 11 prom, it was an end of an era, and a very enjoyable evening.




I said my primary school used to be a JMI (Junior mixed Infants), well here are some pictures from the day we changed to primary. A few months earlier us pupils had taken a vote on whether we should be called community or primary, it was fairly unanimous that we should be primary.

On the day everyone had either a green or yellow balloon (school colours), the head teacher called stansted airport to tell them there'd be quite a few balloons in the flight path that day, and we let them go in the ceremony. Then the 2 oldest and youngest pupils (unfortunately i was in year 5 so a year too young for this honour) cut the ribbon to declare us officially open. Then we all received bookmarks and had cake.


This next picture is a combination from my years at secondary school:

In the first picture I have a pair of penguin feet sticking out of my blouse while in RM (resistant materials), my friend found it so amusing that a picture had to be taken - just look at my enthusiasm!
The second picture is a whole group photo from the last day of year 9, how we've shrunk since then!
Then we have my friend, surrounded by books, on a day of maths a geography revision.
And finally, all dressed up for the year 11 prom. :)


This collaboration is from a variety of school trips, the first is me with my best buddy on arrival at mount Vesuvius in Italy in year 9, next we have the rewards trip in year 10 - a trip to the Doctor Who experience in Olympia, London. The next two are from year 12, the first to New York in February and the following to Birmingham for Geography in Novemeber.

And now for the final collaboration, a selection of my favourite moments.

We have a trip to Center Parcs with my (ex) boyfriend in 2011, it was lovely to have a family holiday, without my own family haha! Don't get me wrong, I love my family, but our holidays have only once in 17 years been an actual holiday, rather than work.

Then we have the olympics, for which we scored tickets to (and the paralympics), followed by seeing Michael Mcintyre live, although I had a very painful neck at the time, so had to sit on the end of the row and lean out sideways to see him!

Then we have my 17th birthday at the Natural History museum with 2 of my friends and my new (ex) boyfriend, I do love dinosaurs y'see...
And finally, two of my buddies on the weekend camp nearly three weeks ago, it was a brilliant weekend. No doubt i'll have a lot more happy camping memories when I get back from the summer camp to Lochearnhead in Scotland. :)



I said I liked to read, well, here's the proof - I was an early reader, apparently!

Or maybe I just wondered what was on TV

Strangely enough, I still have this book lying around somewhere!

Well, that's all for now, I broke up from school for the summer today and I'm going to make the most of it by getting on with my holiday work outside before I go to Scotland, knowing my luck, it'll snow while I'm there haha!

Alons-y!

Weekend camp

I've had projects pouring out my ears over the last couple of weeks!
Carrying out my own experiment for psychology, a compilation of info for history, teaching my own lesson for history and a fieldwork report for biology!
All this called for a much needed break, this was granted at the weekend (Friday 5th - Sunday 7th July 2013), when me along with 5 other explorers and 2 leaders went on a camp to Tolmers activity centre, we had a right blast!

On arriving at 7pm on Friday evening, we headed up the campsite to find our pitch, and then pitched our tents (one each, as I was the only girl so needed my own, so everyone got their own), mine was an old tent with very bent poles so took a little longer to put up than the others.
After that we collected wood for the fire and spent the evening relaxing with good chatter, swiss roll and marshmallows.

We like a fire

We went to bed around midnight (after removing a MASSIVE moth from my tent).

On saturday, a team of 2 cooked breakfast and we left the campsite for a hike at 11:30am, little did we know how long we would be gone.

We stopped to watch a couple of cricket matches

When we finally got back to camp, we relaxed for a while before collecting some more wood and cooked the dinner (spaghetti!).
Following that, we sat around the fire and were eaten alive by mosquitos, so I got the insect repellent and it got passed around the group, before we realised we were recklessly spraying an "extremely flammable" substance very close to open flames...
We got the marshmallows out and Mike toasted his in a stealth position:

Little did he know that the marshmallow he was toasting would result in hours of laughter.

On returning to the group, Mike announced that his marshmallow "looks like a willy" (it did), this resulted in some very childish laughter, every time I regained control, I heard Tom's high pitched giggle or Duncan's monkey laugh and burst into hysterics all over again, we were in fits of laughter for 2 hours non-stop - it was insanely painful.

The following morning we went climbing and abseiling at 10:30 and then packed up the kit and went home, It was such a brilliant weekend and I became really good friends with everyone.

Well that was my weekend, I've got lots of projects and reports to write so I'll be back soon.

Alons-y!

Work experience, University visits and summer

Well, It's been a busy couple weeks over here, I was on work experience at Paradise Wildlife Park from 17th-2st June 2013; monday-Wednesday I was on Farmyard which was loads of fun, I was cleaning out Rabbits, Guinea pigs, sheep, goats, pig ducks, tenrecs (and cuddling rabbits!).
Then Thursday and Friday I was on Paddocks with Zebra, Camel, Alpaca, Tapir, Wallaby (I wanted to take one home!), fox, deer....

He's a big bunny

This is Boris

Tiny Tenrec (called Puff)

Russian Hamster

Here Mousey Mousey

Boris liked my shoes

And the shovel...

Foxyyyyyy

The following week had a severe lack of lessons as well, Monday and Tuesday were business as usual, although my history teacher was not in, then on Wednesday us year 12's were bundled onto a coach to the University of Essex for a higher education fair, this gave us a chance to talk to people from hundreds of universities across the UK (and made me realise that it may not be a good idea to drop geography) and get some freebies too - a definite high point!

On returning home I headed off to Explorers for a game of real-life where's wally! This consisted of one of our leaders hiding "somewhere" in the town and we had to text questions that he could only answer yes or no to. My team was 2nd to find him so didn't win the prize for finding him first, but we were the first team back to the scout hut by quite a long time so we won a box of lindor chocolates to share. :D

Then on Thursday I headed to Bristol with my Dad for the university open day, the sun was shining, it was warm and I fell in love with the city.
The Archaeology even has a fleet of landrovers for transporting students to various dig sites!
I used the trip to get some photography in, so here's a few of my shots:

Welcome to the Open day (Victoria rooms)

Clifton suspension bridge

View from Clifton Suspension bridge

I think it's a very photogenic city and I could definitely see myself living here and spending summer days sitting in one of the parks with lots of books, working the day away.

I'd best be off, I need to get some work done if I'm going to get the grades to actually get in here! :D


Alons-y!

Year 13 - A2

Well, that's it, year 12 is officially over!
Final exam was on wednesday 5th June, I then had 4 days to recuperate before coming back to school today to start my A2 courses.
The whole applying to uni has really hit me now, considering how sure I was just a few months ago that I wanted to do psychology, i'm now somewhat torn between psychology, palaeontology and archaeology; not helpful when I need to churn out a personal statement tailored to my subject... I'm thinking that my AS results in August will make the decision for me (or at least, i'm telling myself that for now). Right now I'm doing rough drafts of statements for each subject and i'll make the final decision at a later date.
I also need to make a decision about which subjects i'll be continuing with as I believe it's highly unlikely that I can continue with 4 subjects and an EPQ as well as starting up my business and getting more involved as a young leader while doing my silver DofE - I might just keel over!

Over the weekend I was working at Gosfield shopping village near Braintree (do feel free to visit - seriously!)

My display

While there, I spotted an item that I fell completely in love with and I'm not entirely sure why, perhaps I found it charming, let me know what you think:

It's a Raleigh folding bike, priced at £75, I might just ask my family to club together for one christmas present haha!

Got my first A2 geography lesson tomorrow, I'm going to need all the relaxation I can get, I think i'll treat myself to 10 minutes of personal statement-ing followed by a good old movie, perhaps Matilda, one of my all time favourite stories. :)

Alons-y!

I'm still here - honest!

I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks since my last post, it's all got a bit crazy here with exams and whatnot, but I am still here - honest!

Totally snowed under with Biology and Psychology revision this week as I was ill during the first exams and messed up big time, so I need to ace these ones to bring my grades up.

Snowed under Psychology

Those of you that are observant may notice that i'm wearing shorts - DO NOT BE FOOLED! I'm only wearing them to convince myself that it is in fact, summer (it's not working). At 10am this morning, it was 10 degrees celcius, on the 30th May...less than a month before midsummer...

I've rediscovered a childhood love - My parents are aliens, I've actually ended up scheduling revision breaks for 14:30 and 17:30 just so I can tune into CITV and watch it! I know, I know, It's a bit sad for a 17 year old to be watching a kids TV show, but it makes me laugh and there's so much humour that I didn't pick up on 10 years ago!

I also spent a good few minutes exchanging "miranda memes" with a friend - and formed an entire conversation! (This was before settling down for revision)

In fact, all this Miranda talk is making me want to watch it, I'm going to have to dig out the DVDs any minute now! (Well, I have powered through todays revision and I need a good laugh!)

In fact, I can't contain myself any longer, I must leave now while I still have time before dinner.

Alons-y My hearty reader chums! (Anyone see what I did there...No? Just me then.)

2 down, 6 to go.

Well, today officially marked the start of the exam period for me, I arrived at school, as usual, at 8am, I then spent an hour drifting between last-minute revision and ultimate panic.

9am - TO THE SPORTS HALL, SEAT T11. (I thought the italics might make it seem more dramatic...no? Oh well.)

This was for my history exam on Race and American society 1865-1970s, I was well prepared for this exam(a little too prepared, it would seem), I had fairly good knowledge of the entire period and was fairly confident. 

On reading the interpretation, my initial thought was "well, that's a bit odd compared to all the past papers, oh well, I can still use the sources in the same way."

Oh boy was I wrong, barely ANY of the sources supported the interpretation and it was so difficult to find similarities between them as they varied so greatly and contradicted each other.

Despite this, I think I've done ok.

I then spent 10:30-11:20 trying to de-stress in preparation for my geography exam at 1, it wasn't very effective.

At 11:20 I went to my geography lesson (only 3 of us actually turned up!) and we went over some last minute facts and figures (but did any of them prove to be of any use in the exam..what do you think?..) before explaining to our teacher that we all have have a revision website: www.examtime.com following us on Twitter because we're such geography nerds. 

After this, we went to the sixth form block just to relax and try not to think about what was quickly approaching  and had a banana :P 

By the time we left at 12:50, I was feeling strangely calm, all the way until lining up outside. This didn't last.

This is was me about a minute before going in:

And this was my face afterwards:

I'll elaborate: there was little range in the topics that came up and it was very difficult to actually include any case studies in my answers, I managed to somehow though, it's difficult to explain but it was just...odd.

Come out of the hall at 2:30...straight to my history lesson for the Elizabeth Topic, we did a bit of revision on parliament and factions and my teacher gave us all a toffee crisp as a reward for the history exam this morning.

After this, it was FINALLY hometime, or so I thought...

I wasn't looking forward to waiting outside at the bus stop for 20 minutes in the rain but I knew i'd be home soon, little did I know that the bus had actually broken down and we'd have to wait over an hour for a replacement coach to pick us up.

Finally arrived home just after 5 and had dinner before doing some light biology revision and writing this post.

So exams are officially underway now and I just need to keep focussed for a few more weeks...and then another year...

I'd better go now and get on with some more geography or biology revision for round two.

Then I'm going to settle down in front of the TV (probably fall asleep in front of it - I'm knackered) and have the giant cookie my Dad bought me as a treat (he's seen how much revision I've done recently and felt I needed a pick-me-up)

GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE ELSE WITH EXAMS! :D

REVISING CASE STUDIES

REVISING CASE STUDIES

Just thought I'd let you know how I've been revising case studies for geography (although I'll be using it for psychology and other things too.)

First: I write down the rough notes (as few as possible) on the topic, in this case: The Philippines as a hazard hotspot:



Next, condense these notes into revision card size on the same piece of paper (I drew around a card on my piece of paper)

. I've underlined in different colours to create an order to put on the real card.

I then copied these notes onto a flash card:

Finally, I do the whole Look,cover,write,check palava on another card outline to ensure that all the information has been digested :)

And that's it, I've done that for each case study and I'm feeling way more confident about using them in the exam on Tuesday now! :D

Good luck!!!!!!