By Amber, aged 17

During this quarantine, I have found that doing school from home has been one of the hardest challenges because sometimes it may be hard to find motivation to do it. However, distance learning has made me more independent and more disciplined. School work has been something that has occupied some of my time and even though it has been difficult at times, I’ve found the flexibility of studying at home more convenient for me.

Being at home has made it easy to lose track of which day of the week it is, but having set zoom calls from my church youth group twice a week has helped put some structure into my week. Having been used to the usual structure of school and other activities to having none at all, was a dramatic change. So being able to still have a little bit of structure through my church youth calls has helped me quite a lot and Zoom has been very useful in making it still possible to interact with one another.

Recently, I have tried going on 40 minutes to an hour walks everyday by myself, to make sure that I stay active and catch some fresh air. I enjoy listening to music or talking on the phone to my friends whilst walking. I enjoy my time outside, because being in the house the whole day can get boring and it’s nice to have a change of scenery.

As we have a lot more time on our hands to learn and practice new things, I have used this opportunity to start researching and looking into universities that I might want to attend. I have also started to practice for my driving theory test. Additionally, I have spent more time developing my Instagram hair page, by buying equipment to take better pictures and I have been practicing new hairstyles on my mum.