​About a week ago, a representative from the Kely support group came to talk to us about smoking. This happened on a Monday morning, during our PHSE period. Her name was Elaine. She talked about the importance of knowing how smoking can affect your health. She said that cigarettes mainly contained nicotine, which contains tar, which can eventually build up in your lungs. In small doses, nicotine is a stimulus, and in large doses, it acts like a depressant. When she told us that a single cigarette held more than 4000+ chemicals besides from nicotine, I was astounded. I asked her why there were so many harmful chemicals including: arsenic (which is used in rat killers), ammonia (which is found in cleaning solutions) and many more toxic solutions. Elaine explained that the reason was that these killer chemicals actually helped to prolong the cigarette puffing time! 
Now have you ever wondered why you keep swallowing every 5 minutes or so? Well, in a nutshell, it is because you have tiny hair in your throat that helps trap the dust and bacteria that goes into your mouth, and move it out. Then you swallow the mucus and your stomach acid deals with it. But, when you smoke, you end up damaging these tiny hairs and they stop moving. That increases your chances of lung cancer and pretty much every type of cancer there is. Also, it can stain your fingers yellow, and in extreme cases, cause gangrene! It can also present serious oral problems later in your life if you keep smoking.
In conclusion, I thought that this talk was very meaningful and helpful. It helped me better understand the risks of smoking and also helped my understanding why not to smoke. Smoking is very harmful to your health. I learned a lot about smoking during this talk! Finally I would like to finish of with a quote: “Don’t smoke, You’ll choke!” . Written by Ryan Ning from Y7A

On the 29th of November, Matthew Scholar, Eddie Williams, several other FIS students and I participated in an annual event taking place in Discovery Bay, known as Team Fear.
Team Fear is a demanding race consisting of running, biking, coasteering, abseiling, swimming, canoeing, and rock-scrambling in order to raise money for the youth outreach charity. Said charity works with youths at risk from the triads, drug abuse etc. and helps them become respectable and responsible members of the community and contribute towards society.
Matthew and I had entered Team Fear last year as well so we had an idea of what to expect from this year's course and once again we entered to enjoy the experience and not in order to try and win. However, that is not to say that we didn’t try our hardest.
This year’s race didn't start off as smoothly as we would have hoped as Matthew had left his gloves at home, a vital piece of equipment you can't start the race without, and I probably didn't get as much sleep the night before as I should have had.
Fortunately, Matthew’s dad was able to bring the gloves when he brought over Matthew’s younger brother who was participating later and we were able to start.
Throughout the course, we were stretched to our physical limit and had to overcome numerous obstacles in order to reach the finish line. One obstacle I found tremendously hard was when I had to carry a bike up what seemed like thousands of steps, without Matthew’s help, but it was okay because he was carrying a very heavy and precious egg that could not be broken. In addition, another unfortunate accident occurred when I snapped our canoe paddle in half, however this was an improvement on last year when I broke both.  At the end of the race, we crossed the finish line and to our utmost surprise we discovered we had finished in 4th place in U16 (2 places slower than the year before) with a faster time of 2:54:06.
Team Fear was a strenuous, physically daunting race, yet it still remains as one of my highlights of 2015 and I’m sure I will be participating again next year. Elliot Topping (with a tiny bit of help from Matthew Scholar and Eddie Williams) year 10

On the 7th of December 2023 the students of year 8 A had the opportunity to visit the year 5 and 6 Christmas Concert. We were lucky enough to sing three songs, two with the years 5 and 6 (Hark the Herald Angels Sing and Naughty/When I Grow Up) and the other, Thinking Out Loud (shown above) by ourselves. During this time our class learnt a lot about teamwork, unity, and being on time. This was a fantastic opportunity to have a lot of fun and show off our singing skills to the younger years. A special thank you to Mr. Wan for organising the Christmas Concert and letting us join in, and to Mr. Pham, for accompanying us on this adventure and filming the process. We had lots of fun and hope that the years 5 and 6 did too!  Madeleine Tzatzakis