Weekly meeting

At this evening's Zoom meeting we were pleased to welcome 3 teachers from Wayland Academy, who had joined us to discuss and announce winners of three competitions we have successfully run at the school in recent weeks. Katie Allott teaches photography at the Academy and worked with Dr Mike on our Young Photographer competition. Gaynor Evans teaches cookery and whilst we were unable to run our usual Young Chef competition due to Covid 19 restrictions, we did, with Gaynor's valuable help run a 'virtual' cake decoration competition, whereby pupils were invited to cook a standard sponge cake and decorate it, then send in photos of it, which we then judged. Richard Patterson is Deputy Head of English at the Academy and helped us run our first attempt at Rotary's Young Writer competition. The winner of this competition progressed to a District-wide competition, and if successful will progress to a National final.

We were shown the entries for the photographic competition by Dr Mike, who organised and judged the competition. He took us through each picture, explaining how he awarded marks. and pointing strengths and weaknesses of each image. Similarly Mike G showed pictures of the cake decoration competition, and explained how our judge Chris Rowe awarded marks for theme, decoration and look of the cake when sliced. Obviously, as she was only judging photos Chris was unable give the ultimate test, that of taste, which could only be guessed at from the photo.

Finally we turned to Young Writer, where we were lucky to secure the services of local author Joan Khurody to judge the entries. Pupils were tasked with writing a story, either fiction or non-fiction, in not more than 550 words, on the given topic of 'My Happiest Day'. Joan took the trouble to write a personal letter to each entrant by way of feedback, but also to encourage them to keep on writing as we will always need people to tell us stories. Mike G read out the winning story, about Christmas Day.

President Mike Haythorpe thanked the teachers for attending this entertaining evening, but more importantly, for their invaluable support, without which we couldn't run our competitions at the Academy.