Making the most of lockdown
Thursday 23 July 2020
Raya and her friends were disappointed when their work experience was cancelled due to lockdown. But they turned this challenge into an opportunity to raise money and awareness for the British Dyslexia Association.
Hi! My name is Raya and I am currently in Year 12.
Due to the unfortunate circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, my friends and I were unable to complete the work experience we had planned. However, as a 'new and adapted' form of work experience, our school set us the task of creating a promo video and fundraising for a charity we are passionate about.
Choosing a charity close to our hearts
We chose the BDA (British Dyslexia Association) as both my friends have dyslexia and struggled with it throughout their early school stages. They went on to attend Fairley House School, who work with the BDA, and have thrived ever since. Furthermore, the current situation of lockdown made us think about all of those children with dyslexia struggling with home schooling and online lessons.
Shining a light on learning difficulties
I hope that by raising awareness for the BDA and the work that they do, we can show that being dyslexic is not something to hold you back or be embarrassed about. We are all fervent supporters of raising awareness around learning difficulties and feel a spotlight needs to be shone on it.
We were very pleased with how our project and video turned out as it met all our expectations . Our school even judged the videos and we were awarded runners up! The reason we didn’t win was that our video was too long - there were clearly too many important things to say!
Learning key life skills
Whilst the main focus of our work experience was to raise awareness and money for the British Dyslexia Association, we also learnt a lot of valuable skills too.
One key lesson being that communication is key. Since we were unable to meet up and discuss in person, my friends and I would have weekly FaceTime calls to check-in and see where we were up to.
We were flexible and adaptable - my friend discovered that her camera didn’t work so we came with the idea of her doing a voice over instead of filming, another friend would then paste her audio into a frame with only the BDA logo on it, this drew attention to her voice and worked very well!
We were disciplined - we wanted to discuss in detail how we would fundraise, however this felt like a documentary, therefore we had to cut down and only include relevant information.
As well as supporting an amazing charity, this task taught us many valuable skills which will be useful for later in life. It was definitely worth it!
If you're interested in fundraising or raising awareness for the British Dyslexia Association, then take a look at the different ways you can get involved and support us.