Day 1

I am a Fitzharrys student in year 10 and this is my work experience diary/blog. I ended up in Trinity Church by accident to be honest, as I was originally meant to be at Milton Park ICT centre but unfortunately they had to drop me due to staff shortages. Trinity gave me a place so I didn’t miss out.

On my first day here (Monday) I arrived at the gate outside feeling very nervous, I had really bad butterflies in my stomach, I didn’t know what was going to happen. Hundreds of other kids would have felt the exact same way as I was.

When I walked through the door to the church I couldn’t find the office I was meant to be working at, so after walking around for a bit, getting more and more frustrated, I finally found it, and upon walking into the office I proceeded to accidentally scare the life out of our mentor for the week, Rosemary. After all the introductions and safety procedures we sorted out our jobs for the week, with mine being: Carswell Community School garden invitations for the grand opening of their brand new sensory garden and to produce an emotions fan for children with special needs.

On that Monday we had a stroke club meeting, where we spoke to people who had suffered from strokes. We had a great time talking to them and helping them out, they really opened our eyes to what it’s actually like to have a stroke and have to put up with what they go through.

Day 2

what was meant to be an apparently boring day of just non-stop laptops and technology actually turned out to be a great day as we really got stuck into the work we were doing. On that day I realised just how much patience I had as the laptop was playing up and I was getting really wound up about it. Nothing seemed to be going well on the computer, but in the end I just sat down, stayed patient, and eventually- after much mouse clicking and other things I managed to sort the laptop out. We also did a lot of office work that day, and during that day I learned a lot of new skills on the computer, so work experience has been good and a fun way to learn things (better than school)

That’s pretty much it from day 2, as it really was just laptops all day, nothing more, nothing less.

Day 3

Day three was to be honest pretty boring, but hey, you can’t expect to have fun everyday can you? This is work we’re talking about! Anyway all I had to do that day was make an invitation to the opening of Carswell School Sensory Garden, which is designed to help little children by letting them have a place to sit and think. This is mainly for the children whose parents are away in Afghanistan; let us pray that they all make it safely home.

Anyway, once I finished doing the 200 garden invitations, I felt very proud of myself for sticking with it, but I felt even better when I could just sit down and relax.

Day 4

The penultimate day. Well what can I say; day 4 was perhaps the best day this week. I thought it was great fun: we covered a parent-toddler group session. I personally was not looking forward to this at the start, because I’ve never been one for little kids, but I got convinced to give it a go and it turned out to be a great time. I loved playing with the play dough, because I’m really childish, but oh well. We helped painting, another entertaining thing, and everyone there was friendly (if anyone from there is reading this, thank you very much for a great time!) Then after a few hours of fun, but hard work, I started writing this blog that all you wonderful people may or may not be enjoying, and completed the first 2 days in about 2 hours. This blog has been very challenging to write as I’ve had a lot of hard work to do this week and this has sort of been done in my spare time, but I’m glad I’m doing it because it helps me with future life skills, because everyone needs ICT skill and this placement certainly helps with that.

Day 5

It’s now the final day and I’m going to really miss my work experience. It’s helped me learn a lot of skills about work, and given me a lot of life skills, like social skills, conversational skills and an altogether made me a much more confident and better person.

Today all we’ve done is add the finishing touches onto our work, so we can have it looking amazing and so we can be proud of all the hard work we’ve put in this week, and believe me there’s been a lot. But through perseverance and a lot of patience we made it through and finished everything on time, which gives us great relief and a warm feeling of achievement. Any doubts I had at the start of the week have completely gone, and I’m convinced I learned more valuable lessons here than I would have done at Milton Park. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this because speaking to people about work experience, they all say they’d rather do this than go back to school, and I’m with them on that. This has been a great week full of ups and downs, snappings of patience and also one of the most exciting and useful things I could learn in my years before becoming and adult, so thank you Trinity.