About 2 weeks ago, the majority of my grade went to Chiang Mai for experience week! And the rest went to Beijing. I loved everything about the trip, and I wish we could’ve stayed longer. The resort we lived was special because it was programs for us everyday, like hiking, kayaking, rock climbing etc. It was fantastic During that week, I think the two most demonstrated learner profile attributes I had was being a risk-taker and principled. The reason why I was a risk-taker is because in a lot of activities, I volunteered even though I was scared to do it. For example, the Confidence Course! I was really nervous to do it, because it seemed really difficult, but in my mind I was like “YOU CAN DO IT NICOLE”, so when the instructor asked for volunteers I raised up my hand straight away. Also, I think I was principled, because I listened to all the rules, like staying in our rooms at 9:00 and lights out at 10:00. This was one of the best school trips I have ever been to, because I got a lot closer with some friends I haven’t talked to in a while and made a lot of new friends there! 

This is a picture of me eating the noodles we “cooked” with the camp fire we made.

We finally managed to finish our documentary!

7D Kowloon Walled City 2013 from Katie Yeung on Vimeo.

If you don’t find please take a few minutes and give us some feedback?

Sorry, we had some problems recording the footage, so it looks like we’re floating..

Please complete these sentences:

1. I like…
2. I wish… 
3. What if…
4. I learned this about Hong Kong’s culture..

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.

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.

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:

Watch this space for my Hong Kong Heritage documentary about Kowloon Walled City.

You can watch the movie in progress at my website.

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.

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.

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.