Easter

Easter holidays !!!

And with that relief also comes work, as I have my end of term exams in June and so I am starting to revise  now. I also have my Piano exam really soon and I need to do more work on that as well.

For starters, Joseph's birthday party was good, but he wasnt 100% so we didn't go to legoland. I made him a bird box !!

I finished The Lovely Bones and started reading (and finished) another book called My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. They were both amazing books. I am now reading the Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

In this last week I have been doing lots and lots of Rowing. We have a race coming up called the Ball Cup which we have been working hard for. I rowed Wednesday 3-8, Thursday 9-4, Friday 8:30-4, and I am going to row on Sunday from 8-2. I'm really glad to have this day off !

On Wednesday I am going to go into town with my friend for the day. We are going to shop (obviously!) and to see the new movie Divergent which will hopefully be really fun!

On Thursday I went to a 13th birthday party of one of my best friends. It was a disco and it was really cool; I got to talk with some of my friends who were at my old school - my friend still goes there - whom I haven't seen in 2 years and I also caught up with  an old friend whom I havent seen in 5 years from my 2nd school.

I will let you know how my day in town will be next post, and be sure to comment!

Thanks !

Exams

Sorry I haven't been blogging recently but I have been really busy and the weeks just seem to fly by!

I got full marks on my Latin test so I was really happy, and so I decided to choose Latin and German for my languages. I also had a Geography test, which I got 83% in. Talking of school, I got my E&As on Monday. E&As are Effort and Achievement grades which at my school we get every month. These grades were my best I think I've ever had. For our Effort Grades, A* is way beyond expected, A is Very Good, B is inconsistent, and C is unacceptable. For our Achievement , 1 is excellent, 2 is Expected level, 3 is Unacceptable. We have 14 subjects. I got 10 A*s, and 11 1s. I got A*1 in all the sciences and maths, and an A1 in English, which I was very proud of. I only got 3 2s, the rest were 1s, and my effort was only A*s and As. It was a really good month for me !!

It's my brother's birthday on the 31st (he's going to be 7) and our family is going to go to legoland and invite some of his friends over for a birthday tea. I will have to decide what to get him soon, and I have no idea what he's really into these days.....

My title today was exams because I'm starting to feel the pressure of my piano Grade 5 which I am having on the 2nd of May.  Also, with the lent term almost over, it's going to be the end of year exams soon, and I will have to start revising for them about 2 months before ! My violin Grade 5 exam will (hopefully) be in the summer term. I say 'hopefully' because right now my teacher thinks I need to work harder until she thinks I am ready enough to be put in for it.

I started reading on Monday (and finished today) a really good book called The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides. It was really really good and I think that style of book is one that I can enjoy. I am now reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.

Please comment if you have anything to say, and keep reading ;)

Music Competition - Piano

Another week gone by. Time flies when you're at school again, doesn't it?
My Latin test went really well, and. I managed to get all of my homework out of the way. Hopefully I'll know my test score by tomorrow!

Today it was the Piano music competition, which went really well. I was second to another boy who also did well. My friend, Catherine, played great too. I went to town and got a McDonalds with my friend before and then went back to school for the competition. It was really fun. 

Right now I'm choosing language options for Year 9. We can do German, Russian, Classics, Latin and German, or Latin and Russian. I'm thinking of doing Latin and German, but it's not completely settled yet. If you have any advice, please comment below! 

On Friday I had a sleepover with one of my friends, and it was really fun. We watched 'Confessions of a Shopoholic' (really funny) and we stayed up all night, so it was a thumbs up for the sleepover! 

My Dad is going to Verona, tomorrow, so I won't see him until Thursday. I have a netball match on Thursday as well (I'll let you all know what the outcome of that is). 

Our family friends came over from Cardiff at the weekend, and so it was really nice to see them. They have an 8 year old son called Connor, who is friends with Joseph (my youngest brother). We went out for the day with them on Saturday, and we had a good time; we went to a science centre which we've been to before, so it was nice to go back. 

Overall a really fun week. 

Thanks for reading 😄

New Start

This is a new start. A new section of my blog. My life: Stage 2.

So many things have happened since my last post that it would be boring for you and me to relive it all again. So this is a new start. 

So, to inform you of the basic details of my life now...

I am 12 years old, almost 13. 

I go to a private school. I started this school in Year 7 and have now completed 1 and a half terms of Year 8. 

I still play Piano and Violin, but I stopped French Horn at the end of Year 6. I also stopped Ballet.
I have two younger brothers.

These are my main achievements in my life so far:
I sung at the Royal Albert Hall
I performed at the Royal Festival Hall
I sung at St. Paul's Cathedral
I performed and sung at Snape Maltings several times

That is the basic outline of my life so far.

So now we can get on to recent things that has happened to me.

This week was half term - Yayyyy !!! - and I went with my Mum and brothers to our friends' house 2 and a half hours away. Our friends have 3 children: a 12 year old, a 10 year old, and a 5 year old, so its close enough to our family's ages and we all gbet on really well. Katie (12), Thomas (10), Elliot (my brother(10)) and I went to a 3-day stop animation course at a theatre near their house. It was extremely fun. If you want to check out some of the animations we made, then click on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtW8DNm8UaFdkQFSy_RTeEg
Mine and Katie's are:
Scrap-tastic 03
Dancing Man 04
Space Unicorns 1

Elliot and Thomas' are:
Scrap-tastic 04
Dancing Man 2
Terrible Trio 01

Other than that, all I did was relax on my holiday. I actually have lots of homework due for this week that I was meant to do in half term - I did it today. I have a Latin test on Tuesday which I am revising for as well. I did Rowing this morning from 8 until 12:30 which was fun though. At my school I ampart of the Chapel Choir, and last term we sang 2 pieces at Snape Maltings that we recorded (with the BBC Symphony Orchestra) for BBC Radio 3 - this should probably have been on my main achievements list. In this half term we are going to sing at King's College in Cambridge, but I'll tell you about that once I know more about it.

FYI: I got an iPad mini for Christmas, so that is what I am blogging on now.

Thanks for listening, and now hopefully people will start reading this again!

Also, feel free to comment any time! ;)

My Scratch Project

In my last post I said that I would embed one of my Scratch Projects in a post, so this is it. Scratch is a visual programming language and you can use it to make your own games and things like this.

Here it is:

Can you spot the bad dancer (that's me)?

Learn more about this project

Fill-In

The first thing I'm going to say before I say anything else, is that I'm sorry I've been such a bad blogger lately. Everything has been going on so fast and I just can't fit in a time to blog about it. So now I'm going to have to fill you in.


My ballet exam went really well, I still haven't got any news, though. As the summer holidays crept slowly closer, the work at school began to come down to watching movies and things like that. As this was my last week at this school it was kind of sad for me, leaving all my friends behind. The last day was finally here. There were a few tears in the morning from the year eights who were the oldest in the school and were going up to upper school. We worked through the day which actually, now I think of it, included no work at all. For the last lesson we had a party in our form room, with of course lots of crying. On the bus on the way home I was afraid the bus was going to flood, because all the year eights crying. 


The Summer Holidays!!! Aahhhh, a break! Time to chill out! Not for me and my brothers. My Mum has recently started on a part time job which means that both my Mum and Dad are working. Luckily, my Dad can work at home, so he works in a little office in the garden. My Mum travels to work, but as she is so hardworking and amazingly talented, she will leave me and my brothers an email so that we can read it throughout the day. This will consist of all the things that she would've told us to do if she were here. But, as she isn't, she leaves it all in an email instead. This isn't all chores though; this email may also say 'watch TV for half an hour, Lily's turn to pick the program.' It was actually a really good thing to do, because it kept us busy until she got back, and Dad would come and make our lunch or just pop in occasionally. My Mum also set us projects on Scratch, a programming document, and if you know about Scratch you will know that it is an amazing thing and is really fun to play around with, but if you don't I suggest that you try it out, because it's a really good way to learn how to make your own games and stuff. I'll leave a link to the website at the bottom of this post. 


Well, that pretty much sums up what I've been doing in my summer holidays so far. Here's the link to the Scratch website:scratch.mit.edu 


Hopefully, next time I'll work out how to get some of the stuff that I've done there on here. Got to go to Rowing now!

Rainy Days

The worst thing about this week is the weather. Rain forevermore. But besides the weather, my week was actually really good. On Monday I had quite a normal day at school; nothing really happened except that I had my French Horn lesson. On Tuesday though, I had a practice of my dance that I'm performing at my local upper school, and then in a festival. That meant that I got to miss two lessons. After school, I had my second-last ballet lesson before my exam.On Wednesday, I had another dance practice and 1 lesson out of my school day, and after that another two lessons out because I had to practice for my concert that night. I then went home, had my violin lesson, and quickly whizzed back to school for the concert. The concert went very well, and I performed a violin solo. Going on to Thursday, I performed in our school talent show, playing my piano, and I won!(YAY!!!)

Friday the 13th. Well, let's just say it's the best Friday the 13th I've ever had! Two of my friends that live in my local area thought that it would be fun to camp out, because it was the weekend, and it was an unlucky day, so it's always funny if you plan something just to see it go wrong. We tried to camp out in a tent, but the only friend that had a tent wasn't allowed. So we tried just sleeping in her house. That didn't work. We tried the other friend's house. No luck. Finally, I asked my mum and dad if my friends could sleep over. It worked! So me, my dad and my two friends went to the shop and bought loads of sweets so that we could have a midnight feast. We also watched a movie(Mean Girls 2). So now I'm very tired because we went to bed really late, but no luck for me! It was the festival today, which meant I had to get up early to go and dance.

As lots of fun things have been happening I'm going to put some pictures on of the stuff I did!

This is me in my ballet costume

This is me in my dance costume

Me wearing a ridiculous mask holding my French Horn

Be prepared for some more pictures soon! It's Rowing and my ballet exam tomorrow!