On Monday the 23rd and Tuesday the 24th of October, a martial arts course was run for students in TY. It was a self defence course with the aim to teach students how to defend themselves if they find themselves in a difficult situation. I was looking forward to this course as I had never experienced anything to do with martial arts before. On the first morning, we had a talk with the martial arts coach, Daragh, about what the course was about and what we would gain from it. He told us that we wouldn't be focusing on fancy techniques but to keep it simple is the safest and most effective way to defend ourselves. After the talk, we went down to the sports hall and were taught different moves and practised them on each other with foam pads. We learned many different hits and kicks, and also useful things like how to escape a knife attack or how to get up if you find yourself on the ground.
On the second day, there was an assessment of what we had learned, which unfortunately I could not take part in as I had injured my shoulder. However, we will have a third day of the course in the New Year where we will get a chance to do it again. This course was so beneficial as it taught life skills and how to defend yourself in a situation, which is really important. I think it has made me more physically confident and the information might be extremely useful in the future. It was also really good fun and I really enjoyed the experience.
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Each year St. Gerard's School holds an annual music festival. It is a competition where the winner receives a trophy and a money prize. The competition is split into categories; junior vocalists, senior vocalists, instrumentalists and group vocalists. There is a winner from each category every year.
This year I took part in the senior vocalists category. I sang "Lay me Down" by Sam Smith. I love the music festival because it gives people a chance to get out of their comfort zone and perform on stage. I also think it is such a good way for people to show their talents. I really enjoy the festival every year and I think that we are really lucky to be in a school that has such a good music department. On Friday the 22nd of September, a group of students in my year took part in the Eagles Flight workshop that came to our school. A man named Ger ran the workshop, and when we first arrived we were split into five different teams. Each team sat at a different table, and each table had a board game in the middle of it. Ger launched straight into explaining the rules of the game, and as soon as we were finished we were given 15 minutes to plan our strategies of how we would play. It was interesting that we didn't get much of an introduction, we went straight into the rules of the board game. After the fifteen minutes of planning, the game began. The aim of the game was to collect as much gold as possible and return back to the home space in 20 days (each day lasting two minutes). The teams got highly competitive with each other, and some teams were left in sticky situations due to lack of planning. The game was great fun and really tested your ability to plan and work as a team. However, when the game was finished we were told that there was a message behind the game. The board game was supposed to teach us that planning ahead is key when it comes to projects, schoolwork etc. The teams that didn't plan their strategy out well enough were the teams that ended up with the least amount of gold. It demonstrated that working together can also lead to much better results. It also taught us not to aim to win, but to aim to make the best out of the resources you are given. It taught us leadership skills and that giving each person a role in the team can lead to working cooperatively together. Overall I thought the workshop was a really good experience. I think that the hands-on experience of playing the board game, and then reviewing our mistakes and how they affected our results at the end gave a much better message than a talk would have. I really got a lot out of this workshop and would definitely recommend it to other students. I think the skills that I have learned will be very helpful when it comes to projects, schoolwork and even jobs in the future.
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