Kilali's Blog

I have been doing the Montessori Model United Nations (MMUN) conference in New York City these past few days. This year I am a bureau member again and was Vice-chair of the upper elementary food and agriculture (FAO) committee. This is the second conference I have attended as a bureau member in person so I was excited. The topics my committee discuss were the Russia and Ukraine war's effect on food and the empowerment of rural women. On the first day of the committee sessions I worked as the scribe, so along with my vice-chair duties, I was also typing for the delegates when we did certain parts that required typing. I also would type the working papers for the delegates and their final resolution. On the second day, my senior bureau member let me practice being chair which was really fun. I still did roll call, which is one of the vice-chair's duties, but I also got to lead the session, make announcements, and guide the delegates through the process. This was really great for ...

Recently, I and the other presidents of the prom committee have been working to finalize all of the plans for prom. I am inc charge of community roll-out, which means that I organize how we present the theme to the rest of the school. I gathered a small group of about 10 students to work on how to present the theme at our school's community meeting. The theme for our prom is Bridgerton, which is a show on Netflix. At the beginning of the show the Queen picks a diamond of the season, so we thought it would be cool to do a prom theme of the season. We had people dress up in different themes like a cowboy, disco, Rihanna Super Bowl halftime performance, college, and Disney. I and a person I am training to take my role next year created a script for the skit that we would do, as well as set up all of the music. We then went over the full script with everyone and made edits and adjustments according. During the community meeting, we presented the skit and everyone seemed to love it. Peo...

Yesterday, my high school had our Lunar New Year celebration. For the past three years, I have been organizing the celebrations. This year, the teacher who supervises my planning wanted to have our celebration with the middle school, so we can get more students involved. I thought this was a great idea, but I was at first worried about how we would accommodate a lot more people in our activities, as we would be going from about 110 people to 180. This meant that I had to purchase a lot more materials for each activity so that all students and faculty could get participate. We also wanted to make sure we all were staying together and really integrating middle school and high school. For Lunar New Year, we always provide lunch, so I thought it would be good to serve food in the middle school, then require that everyone eats in the high school or on the quad. This way, we were all staying together instead of separating into our building. I think that this worked well to keep us all togeth...

Today, I started taking art of cooking course. We split into groups of three and then started to make dumplings. We started making the dumpling filling, and as we were combining the ingredients we realized that we messed up the lettuce. We were supposed to salt-wash the lettuce, but my group did not do that, so we were worried that the dumplings would explore if we steamed them. We didn't have enough time or enough materials to remake it, so we just kept going with the rest of the steps. We then learned how to roll out the dumpling dough. At first it was really difficult because the dough kept sticking to the table so it would break when I tried to pick it up. The chef teaching us told us to put more cornstarch on the table to keep it from sticking, and that worked so much better. We then went to shape our dumplings. The chef taught us three different techniques. One is basic, where you put the filling in the center then just fold it in half and then press. The second method was to...

Last Sunday, I did a student meet-up for Montessori Model United Nations (MMUN). A student meet-up is where students participating as delegates in an MMUN conference, can meet each other and meet some members of the bureau. The bureau facilitated the student meet-up and lead their own breakout rooms, which is what I did. I did two sessions, one for middle school and one for high school. During the meet up we presented these two different games, one about sustainable development goals, and another about different topics of interest like sports, books, and movies. We used the sustainable development goals game for upper elementary students and the topics of interest game for middle schoolers. Initially, it was hard to get the students engaged, but after a few minutes, most of the students were really engaged with the games. Student meet-ups are really important for MMUN because it makes the students more comfortable with talking about different topics with new people. I personally really...

This past Saturday my school had our winter dance. I am one of the co-presidents of the fun committee, which is in charge of planning school events. For the dance, we went with a winter theme so we used decorations such as snowflakes and white trees. The dance was being held in my high school's west commons, which is a communal workspace, so we could not decorate until the day before. So on the Friday before the dance, I made a sketch of the entire space to start planning where all of the decorations would go and to be a guide to the people helping set up. I was really proud of this sketch because I am not the most confident in my drawing abilities, but I think it was very clear. I included the west commons and all of the classrooms and offices attached to it. After school ended the members of the fun committee and I started to decorate the west commons. We put up some of the easier things like the snowflakes on the walls and windows, the fake snow, trees, tablecloths, and silver b...