For our choice revolution unit in Humanities, our summative was to create a video about our revolution. Ania and I created and edited a stop-motion video about our revolution! This took us quite a lot of time and effort, so it would be appreciated if you could watch it! Cuba is an island south of Florida, and its revolution happened quite recently, and some post-revolution events are still going on. We start the video in 1898 and ended it in 1959. Enjoy!
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In humanities, we got into book club groups, reading literary non-fiction books, which is basically a mash between historical fiction and non-fiction. My book is “Flowers in the Gutter” by K. R. Gaddy, and it’s about World War 1, about the Edelweiss Pirates, teenagers who resisted the Nazis but weren’t considered a real resistance group just because they were teens. These are my notes about the central ideas of their story. The first picture is the first page of my summary page, where I took the character’s feelings and wrote them down according to the chapter/part. The second one is a cause and effect page of events that happened in the book (slight spoilers!). The third and fourth pictures are the pages of my synthesis notes, with two of my central ideas in CER format. This is a really great book, with an engaging plot and touching moments, and is recommended. It’s like a history book in fiction form, with accurate facts! Much preferred to a dry textbook (apologies to those poor underestimated tomes!).
In humanities recently, we started our book club unit. I am in a group with my friend, Jenny, and we’re reading “The Gospel According to Larry”, by Janet Tashjian. For our final summative assessment, we planned and recorded a book talk to explain the theme, characters, and basic summaries (without spoilers!) in the book. Hope you like it!
This is the second post of the year! In humanities, we just started our second unit: learning about the Renaissance. During this unit, we also started learning about one of the most important religions in that period: humanism. This might sound familiar to “humanities”, and that’s because it is! Humanism is the belief in individuals and the unity of all truths, basically the opposite of what the church stood for (more information in the infographic). I hope you like it!
In my eighth-grade humanities class, we made a Found Poem out of the stories that we had read throughout the past week. A Found Poem is basically a poem that is free, made usually from the text of a story or a passage. Our theme for the poem is the conflict of the story. The story I chose for my poem is called “The Fan Club” by Rona Maynard. I think the conflict of this story is definitely internal, since it’s bullying with words, not physically, so peer pressure and bullying, also the freedom and discrimination of the “free” American people. I also think one of the most important symbols in the picture is a shell because a shell is what represents a person in the story, named Rachel, since her speech is about shells and that’s what brought upon the bullying.
The single shell in the center represents Rachel, even though she is not the main character, she is the person who incites the bullying just because she’s “dumb” and comes from a poor household. She’s a different color because she stands out from the rest of the school, though not necessarily in a good way, and big because I believe she is trying so hard to ignore the bullying and be brave, and is also trying to be kind. So the largeness of her shell represents her personality. The little groups of shells scattered around the page represents the bullies around the school, each in their little group. They are small shells because I think they’re so shallow! In the story, Laura mentions that the “leader” of the group, a girl named Diane Goddard, doesn’t think about her grades at all, and only cares about her boyfriend and her reputation. The medium-sized shell in the bottom right corner is Laura, and I made her red and brown because it’s a mix between the bullies’ abalone, normal, whites and browns, and Rachel’s red. Since Laura, in the end, sided with the bullies after all, even when Rachel’s been really nice to her, I made her a mix. Bystanders are no use if they just stand there, and she chose to side with the bullies.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you like my poem!
Links:
Here is the short story if you want to read it! Click here.
Here is a little more information about the author, Rona Maynard. Click here.
This poster is our last project in this semester’s enrichment, sci-fi and fantasy. Enjoy! And watch the movie!!
As part of my Science-fiction and Fantasy enrichment project at school, I created an entirely new future/fantasy city from my imagination. I took inspiration from some parts of the world, like identification and green energy and my love for chocolate! As you can probably tell below, it’s name is Valnoa, and it’s near the equator near the ocean (more details in the powerpoint). It’s a my dream utopia and my hope for what humanity can achieve in the future, or at least something close to this, an utopia instead of a dystopia. Enjoy!
https://isbtube.isb.bj.edu.cn/video/The-Inheritance-Cycle-Book-Trailer/02341d2210aef6902b6534165f5cbc22
I made this video as a project for my enrichment at school, Sci-Fi and Fantasy. The series I made it about, The Inheritance Cycle, is one of my favorites! I hope this book trailer convinces you to read it too. Enjoy!
In Humanities class before winter/Christmas break, we wrote an argumentative essay as an assessment. After receiving marks for our essays today, we are asked to write a reflection about it. So here it is: I think something that I did well writing my essay was gathering information. I had a lot of evidence and knew where to put it and when. I think I also wrote a great introduction, capturing the attention of my reading and effectively stating my points without extra, unneeded information. I think an area that I would like to improve on is my own writing. I’m good at pasting information at the places where they are the most effective in convincing my reader in my opinion, but my writing is kind of difficult to understand, as Ms. Rivera wrote. The only two places where I marked myself and where Ms. Rivera marked me on the rubric (for the assessment) differently was the “establish and maintain formal style” and “describe the roles of political, civil, and economic organizations in shaping people’s lives”, both of which Ms. Rivera gave me a higher mark. The biggest challenge when doing this assessment was actually finding good sources. Some of the sources that I searched up didn’t have very good information. I solved this by not only searching up random sources in the search engines but actually searching up people’s stories in uniforms, which is my topic (Schools should not make uniforms compulsory). This didn’t just reinforce my point my finding people who already agreed with me, but also gave me some expert opinions. So overall, I think I did good, but everything and everyone always has room to improve!
Here I am, posting another blog about my project in design…Oh! Sorry. Kankan here, again, and I’m here to tell you about another project I made in design! This time, Mr. Layman’s challenge really made our imagination spin wild and tested a lot of our design skills: from analyzing to planning to actually make stuff. Our project was to design a prototype that can detect smells. Now, this thing doesn’t exist yet, but if it does, I don’t know about it, but this was our challenge. The prototype didn’t have to actually work (if it did, then we would be famous!), but it still really challenge our creativity and designing skills. As you can see in the pictures above, my prototype resembles a compass with two big cardboard circles with the top that has letters on it, saying N, S, E, and W with a smaller cardboard circle sandwiched between it with black mesh holding it together and a popsicle stick punching straight through the middle. I used a combination of cardboard, hot glue and mesh to make this compass, plus a lot of lead. You might be thinking, but, Kankan, you didn’t tell us how it works yet! If you are thinking that, wait, I’m getting to it! My inspiration started when I thought about cardboard. Cardboard, if you cut it in half and look really closely at the center, it is made up of holes inside. I thought, if we could make this in real life, I could put sensors inside the holes to detect smell! With that in mind, I cut two big circles of cardboard and one smaller circle, and cut an identical hole that matches up in all of the circles, where the popsicle stick goes. And here is the part where I tell you how the compass works. If the compass worked, then the small circle between the two larger ones act as a vacuum, sucking in air to the sensors inside the holes of the cardboard. The sensors, after detecting a smell, rotates the popsicle stick so that the shadow that it creates, like a sundial, points to the direction that the smell is coming from. Now, before you say it, I will address some of the problems with my design. And before I say that, I just want to tell you that this project was a rush job. So don’t judge me! So, onto the problems. One, the compass only tells us where the smell is, but not what it is. Also, there may also be other smells in the air, so the compass may not know which smell to lead us too. But other then that, I think it’s good! This project was also enjoyable, though we didn’t have much time to do it, since we spent much of this semester on our other project, my last blog post. So thank you to Mr. Layman for being so helpful, and I hope that I have design next year, too!
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