by Nicole on May 15, 2013
In Humanities, we just started a new unit, and it’s a Mini MUN! Which focus on the 8 Millenium Development Goals, also known as MDG. The topic I picked our the 8 was the first one, “Eradicate Extreme Poverty and Hunger,” which was decreasing the amount of people living in poverty in 1981 by half, and I found an article on the world bank website related to my topic. It’s about the fact the the world has achieved the first MDG five years ahead.
One of the reasons why the goal was achieved a few years before 2015, is because countries like China and India that was risen economically. China, for example has 663 million fewer people living in poverty now, than in 1981. Even though the whole worlds average has decreased, the number of people in Africa who lives in poverty hasn’t, it actually increased a bit! In my opinion, I think this goal is one of the most important because to me, poverty effects ones lively hood the most, also it’s really good news that the numbers has gone down, but I think now they should work on Africa first. Despite achieving the goal, the United Nation aims to decrease poverty even further.
The past few weeks in science, we’ve been working on the Kinetic Molecular Theory (KMT), doing a lot of fun experiments and at the end we had a court case whether the KMT exists of not.
This is a picture of the jurors jotting notes down while one of the teams were defending KMT.
I agreed with the jury’s verdict, because first of all, I was part of the jury, and the defense team had a lot of really reasonable facts that supported their statement. In the food colouring experiment they said in the cold water the water molecules are slow and hardly translates thats why the food colouring mixed slower than the hot water.
Like I said just now, my job for this court case was to be the jury, and I think I fulfilled my responsibilities because I did what I was asked to do, listen to both sides, see they’re pros/cons and decide whether KMT is real or not.
If I could do a different job, I would choose being the bailiff, because if they didn’t send me the information they presented, I can interrupt the whole case and ask them not to use that information.
I learned that in KMT, there isn’t just solid, liquid and ice molecules, and if we add heat to something, it can change completely! Which to me is really fascinating.
Before these investigations I wouldn’t really care about how the food colouring dissolves into the water, but now that I know molecules exists, I see almost everything differently, and now I’m a lot more engaged into the science behind everything.
by Nicole on April 19, 2013
Where would you fall on the stress and learning graph? Why?
From a scale, from 1-5 and 5 because I knew everything before the whole unit, I would probably be a 4.5 because I knew 90% of what we learnt, but I still needed practice in dividing two decimals before the test.
What was challenging about this unit? What was easy?
I don’t think they were a lot of challenging things in the unit, but the easiest thing I did was turning fractions into decimals
How was your effort in class and at home reflected in your assessment results?
In class, I do participate by listening and reviewing what i’ve learnt before, and at home, I scan over all the things we’ve down in the unit in my notebook and see which ones I still don’t understand, and if I don’t understand I would ask someone to make sure what to do to solve the problem, and that helps me a lot before a test.
What activity did you like in this unit?
I don’t really have a favourite activity, because all of them were not too east not too hard, and its neutral.
by Nicole on April 18, 2013
A few weeks ago in English class we started reading a book called “The Other Side of Truth”, it’s about two kids from Africa that are sent to stay in London, because their father wrote about the truth in his magazine about the government, and they are about to get him and his family. Honestly, I think the book was really interesting because it was based on true facts/events that happened before.
After reading the book, we started on our summative/project to answer the unit question: Why do people take extreme risks to leave their home country? Everyone in the class chooses a topic that happened/is happening in the world that relates to refugees, asylums etc. And Keona and I chose the topic of the Afghan Refugees during the Taliban so we decided to work together.
Like I said, for our presentation, we based it on what the Afghans did during the Taliban, and I think we did a pretty decent job! In the process of making the presentation, we worked together really well, and we were always ahead of time, our presentation might not be perfect, but I’m still pretty proud of it. 
Here is the presentation:
by Nicole on March 20, 2013
Watch this space for my Hong Kong Heritage documentary about Kowloon Walled City.
You can watch the movie in progress at my website.
by Nicole on March 14, 2013
As you can see from the title of the post, we had D.E.A.D. day today. Which means the whole day, we don’t have any subjects but Design. Our task for the next few weeks is to make a documentary about an assigned part of Hong Kong, more specifically Kowloon side.
1. I like how we were split into small groups to do this project, and not work individually, because this is a pretty big task to do. Also, I really liked how we had free snacks, the muffins were really good.
2. I wish we could have groups from other classes, so we get to work with new people and get used to it, we’ve been working with the same classmates for a few months now, so why not try something else?
3. What if we made the website with wordpress? Because most of the people are used to it, and personally, I think it would be a lot faster to make a website using wordpress.
by Nicole on February 8, 2013
So for the past few weeks, we were working on our own short stories, but that wasn’t the big assignment. The task was to create a presentation for the class, and tell them how you made/created a part of your story, for example the setting, the mood, the character etc. (By the way, the stories we wrote were based on what happened to us before. Well, at least mine was.)
My story is about how I broke my foot when Cherilyn (my best friend) and I went to a summer camp in Canada, and to me, it was pretty “adventurous.” For my presentation, I chose to work on the setting and how I created the mood, and this is one of the slides in my presentation/keynote..
This is a slide about my setting, and what types of sensory imagery I used and where. During this specific slide, I asked them to close their eyes so I could read the paragraph to them, then I asked what they think the mood and if it was easy to picture. They all agreed that the mood was peaceful & calm, and yes is was easy to picture. I mean, don’t you think so?
The skills I learned from the Author’s Choice process and presentation was describing a scene really well with sensory imagery/similes/metaphors and presenting in front of the class without feeling really nervous. I’m going to admit that I’m pretty proud of my story and this presentation.
Even though I think I did a pretty good job on this, if I could do this again, I would give more proof in my presentation, if you don’t know what I mean, put more quotes from my story, where I used sensory imagery throughout the whole thing.
by Nicole on January 24, 2013
For the past few weeks, we’ve been learning about patterns for example, input/output charts, number sequences etc. My favourite part of this unit are the input/output charts, because after you find the rule, it’s really simple, and putting on a graph and finding out the pattern on the graph in my opinion is pretty cool. My least favourite part of this unit is ”Cubes Investigation”, because had to find out rules to figure out how many faces are covered, and it took a really long time to do it. I think I learned the most from the scenarios, because I always had a bit of trouble reading the question, and figuring out the question in the problem, but now I can find the question from the problem easily, and also figure out the solution. Even though I’m pretty confident in this unit, I still have one question. Are there any easy ways or tricks to find out rules? After having a whole unit on patterns, I think it’s really important, because it can help you in life, for example predicting the future (knowing what will come next)
This is a graph of the table pattern task.
We had to find out the rule and figure out how
many students are in each table.
by Nicole on January 24, 2013
For the past few weeks in science, we’ve been working on a project. The assignment was to create (build as well) a new bird species and talk about how it adapts to it’s environment & their behaviors.
In the Amazon Rainforest, I “discovered” a really special bird that…
Adaptations:
- bright blue feathers to make themselves look noticeable
- dark purple feathers on the neck (poisonous) to make predator faint
- height range is 3 – 5 inches (child to adult)
- eggs are small and green to camouflage in the forest
- new born’s feathers are all purple except the head, which is blue
Behavior:
- after mother lays the eggs, she goes hunt, while the father stays to protect the eggs
- travels in groups of 10 to attack prey together
- the male adults takes care of kids for 2 weeks and leaves
- father teaches his children by taking them hunting
- little tiny blue spots everywhere around the egg (poisonous) so when a predator tries to eat the egg, they die in 5 minutes
- looks like an easy prey for eagles/hawks/falcons, when they try to attack, the purple feathers spray poison, and makes the predator faint for 30 minutes, while the predator is asleep, the bird uses its sharp claws to kill the “predator”, and eats it
Making the bird had some strengths and weaknesses…
Strengths:
- fading the purple into the blue around the neck – looks realistic
- the beak (shredder) – a shredder’s beak is like an upside down hook, and the beak I made our of newspaper is really similar
- the whole bird is the perfect size
Weaknesses:
- had trouble making the claws
When I was working on this project inside & outside of class, I think I did pretty well, because I made goals for myself on that day, and I managed to accomplish all of them every single time. Overall, I think I managed my time really well, I finished in time, and because of that, I wasn’t rushing at all, therefore I put a lot of effort into it.
Even though I’m pretty proud of my final product, if I got to start all over, I would make my bird look more scarier, maybe change the colour of the feathers, their size etc.
If I was marking my own bird, I would give myself 5/6 because I followed all the small tasks one by one, and finished all of them with clearly explained adaptations and behaviors, showed how the bird is perfect for the environment etc.
by Nicole on December 14, 2012
The study of Shi Huang Di is coming to a close, and looking back I realized I learned a lot of new skills from this topic. I learned how to design a poster with the C.R.A.P. principles, improve on working with a group, citing sources/adding note cards on noodle tools and writing proper essays. Even though there were a lot of skills I developed in the past few weeks, my favourite one was using the C.R.A.P. principles for my Shi Huang Di poster. I also learned loads about who Shi Huang Di was and what he did. He was the very first emperor of China, and he built the Great Wall, organized the chinese characters, unified the laws etc. Oh, I almost forgot, we did our first english and humanities exam!
Nicole