As two of the Year 8 leaders of the German Fun Club, we were asked to write a paragraph about our amazing experience with Maya from FitGreenMind.

German Fun Club is an after school club hosted on Thursdays where we taught German to Tate and Daniella, Junior School students, and also to children from St Joseph’s Catholic Primary School. We helped them make a video for the Goethe Institut’s sustainable cooking competition which won 1st prize! The prize was that Maya of Fit Green Mind, a famous German cook who specialises in vegan meals and who has almost 4 million followers on Instagram, came to visit us for a cooking workshop in school. A few other students in year 8 and 9 also created their own video. Rory and Millie came second, and Maya said herself that it was an extremely close competition, though in the end, the German Fun Club's video and dance performance won.

Because of that, 20 German students in Year 8 and 9, plus the children in German Fun Club, got to meet Maya in person, and so on Monday afternoon, before school broke up, we had a cooking session in which we made vegan chocolate muffins. Maya helped us all and gave us the measurements for the ingredients. When the class ended, the people who entered the competition were each given an eco-friendly bag filled with goodies such as vegan gummies from Germany, a notebook, coloured pencils, some pens, and her own special mix of all-round spices, which is perfect paired with any kind of food. However, the people who didn’t enter still got her spices and gummies before they left. Overall, Maya and her team at FitGreenMind were really kind and generous to come all the way from Germany to host our workshop and the Goethe Institut made it a very fun and interactive experience for everyone. Thank you also to Syster, the German Language Assistant, who encouraged us all to enter this competition and helped organise everything.

Aenea E and Kaitlyn M, Year 8