TY Bake Off - ingredients and supplies!

TY-Bake Off

This was a fantastic event which everyone seemed to be interested in and loved! Nearly everyone was looking forward to it and not only that but it turned out to be a great success. My group in my opinion did well, we had great fun and tried really hard to design a delicious muffin, my group consisted of 6 people, Me, Pheobe, Killian, Alienor, Lena and Ciara. We did not win but had a really good time together. The result of our cupcake was pleasing as ours tasted wonderful, but not as good as some of the other cupcakes produced by a couple of other groups. It was a fun event and surely everyone enjoyed it!

Work Experience

I did two weeks of work experience over the spring break, 1 working in the marketing sector of a food business and the other working in a restaurant. I really enjoyed both experiences and found that they were both very useful and experienced a lot from each one. I thoroughly enjoyed the restaurant work experience as It was great fun and hard working which I really like. The food business was also very interesting as it was completely different to working in a restaurant but I learnt a lot from it. In the restaurant I participated in many jobs for example, cleaning tables, washing up, doing some extra work in the kitchen and laying tables as well as serving food for some customers. In the food business I did some scanning, printing, spent a day doing work for the head of marketing which I hugely enjoyed, went out on a delivering shift on the final day and listened to two presentations in both the financial sector of the business and the marketing. Overall i believe it was a great success! I enjoyed every minute of it and learnt a lot which will hopefully contribute to my choice of job in the future!

Shoebox Appeal-Bake Sale

A couple of days ago my team (Columbox) started raising money for the shoebox appeal by making a bake sale! A couple of Hollypark girls made the cookies and put them on a plate and i volunteered to help by bringing the cookies home and baking them, 3 batches of cookies were successfully made! i heard good reports that the cookies tasted nice, Our main aim is to finish the whole event with approximately 150 filled and wrapped shoeboxes! which our business set believe we can achieve. With the money we will be using it to buy toys, objects to fill the boxes and some of the money for buying all the wrapping paper.

House Speeches

A syringe full of cyanide, a watermelon, and an elephant, you are saying to yourself, ‘what is this speech going to be about?’, i am going to talk you through the ivory trade, the methods the reasons and some possible solutions. 

 The poachers use a variety of ways to kill these huge animals such as stoning, poison darts – a slow and painful death, shooting with the use of machine guns and helicopters and probably the most horrendous method – filling watermelons with cyanide and letting an unsuspecting herd suffer and die.

 Ivory – the definition – a hard creamy white substance composing the main part of the tusks of an elephant, often used to make ornaments and other articles.

Throughout history the human desire for ivory – used in products from jewellery to piano keys to priceless religious art objects – has far outmatched efforts to stop the senseless killing of African elephants for their tusks.

In my opinion, i believe this poaching situation has gone way too far. Although the number of elephants is now beginning to rise very slowly, poachers are still killing at least 100 of these harmless animals every day. I believe more needs to be done to abolish this ignorant, greed motivated trade and to stop the the faces of poor elephants being hacked off just for a bit of ivory. A survey in China where much of the ivory ends up, found that a majority of the population did not know where ivory came from, they believed it either fell out naturally, like teeth do or grew like finger-nails!

80% of elephants are illegally killed and only 20% die of other causes. Thats just the average, in North Africa 90% are slaughtered through poaching.Animal rights groups estimate that poachers in Africa kill approximately 30,000 elephants annually. 

Out of the 157 poaching-related cases detected in Kenya in the past three years, less than five per cent have been prosecuted and only three of those convicted were sentenced to jail,I do not believe that this sends out the right message! Prosecute and jail them all.

Wildlife hunting is big business – a 2013 estimate valued the African ivory poaching trade to be worth 17 billion dollars a year (for your interest that is the same size as the video gaming trade in America) and growing.

In China one tusk would be worth $2000 its value therefore tenfold after its shipped out of Africa.

what is the solution? how do we abolish the ivory trade? how do we protect these harmless giants? In 2013 President Obama gave the instructions to destroy, every last carved and high dollar item made of Ivory, this action was taken so that other countries would take notice  of the problem. In South Africa the Government have placed army protection on the border of the Kruger National park to apprehend the poachers who are not only poaching elephants but slicing rhino tails off to use as fly swatters. 

 Elephants are more like us than you may know. They can be left-handed, have the ability to grieve, and – true to reputation – have amazing memories.

I end with a quote from Virginia Mckenna founder of the Born Free Foundation……..’Elephants are living treasures. Nature's gardeners. Nature's great teachers. Tragically some people don't give a damn. They prefer the dead treasure to the living one. We must challenge this so-called 'trade' with all our might and shame on those who would condone it’. 

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This was my house speech in which Stack won but the individual that night was Ella Ejase-Tobrise, who did an absolutely amazing speech and went on to win the House Speeches overall. I must say that day was very nerve racking. I practised throughout the whole day.... When i stood up that night to read my speech i felt really sick, having the whole school concentrating on me made me EXTREMELY nervous! But in the end after my speech was delivered my nervousness turned into happiness because i sat down after i got a round of applause and thought to myself- finally hahaha, but i must say it will be a memory i will never forget in St Columbas. I don't have as many BIG memories like doing the house speech so i feel very pleased with myself. Im pretty sure it will be a memory i will never forget! 

Bag - Packing

Our year recently did an activity to raise awareness for depression, we split into groups and on thursday and Friday we started our activity. My group went to Tesco in Dundrum and offered to help pack bags for customers at the till. Afterwards they would give you a small bit of money going to the charity.  My group consisted of Lisa, Lukas, Daisy, Antonia, Amelia and Lena, i believe we were a successful group and we all had good fun during the process of the activity!

My name is Thomas Meijer, but everyone calls me Tom, I am 15 years old and in 4th year at St Columbas College, this blog will be updating you and describing what I will be doing in Transition Year and the experiences I have in the school and with friends. Hopefully this blog will give you an idea of what we do during 4th year.