This article is about how Nigeria is trying to improve education for out of school children. They are trying to reach one of the Millenium goals in Nigeria. There is also a campagne that is called “All children, One Goal” and that compagne basically helps all the children in Nigeria get basic education from any kind of school. It also helps the children and families that are poor and don’t get an education, it just gives them some support towards your family and basic needs. One really good thing about this is that the person that is in charge of the campagne said that it is important that at the end no child is left out of school which is really significant because then everyone is fair and no one can be getting less needs than anyone else. Also, it would be quicker if other organizations and people helped reach this goal because then it would be very successful. This article is related to the Education for all Millenium goal.

I wonder if any other countries are trying to do this too? Are other countries aware of how it happened in Nigeria? How long did it take to achieve this goal? I really think that it’s good that at least one country has tried to achieve a goal because then it will encourage other countries to do the same. This is my article! 

This last math unit was about fractions and decimals, and it was really stressful for me. On the scale I was around number 4 because I wasn’t understanding a lot of it and I was scared I wasn’t doing so well during class and for the homework. I thought this unit was challenging because there were many things I didn’t understand and I got really frustrated. I also thought it was challenging learning the things that I didn’t know before. What I thought was kind of easy, was what I already learned from my extra math class. The things that I learnt in the extra math class were things like equations with fractions and some word problems. The assessment that we did, which was like the test for the unit, was reflecting only a little about how I work during class and the effort I put in. Because I put a lot of effort to try to understand things during class and when I didn’t, I made sure that I figured out a way to understand so that I wouldn’t fail the test. I liked the activity when we had to use models to demonstrate the equation, because I thought those were fun and easy. 

       In English, we read a book called The Other Side of Truth. It was a very interesting book about refugees and this family being forced to leave their country because of their dad. It was a really good book and I enjoyed the wording used in it and the similes and metaphors were very detailed and pulled me in to want to read more. We had to make a presentation about the refugees in Canada after that, and we worked in partners for that. I learnt that refugees have to get asylum to go to a new country and that helped me with my presentation because then I could explain what kind of things/activities refugees have to go through. I learned to use Prezi during this project and I believe that was a useful skill to know and that is why my group chose Prezi. I will probably have to use it later on and to know the basic skills will be helpful for later. I didn’t like the part of this project when we had to kind of restart, because I was getting really stressed out about how I thought that we weren’t going to get it done on time. 

      I worked on almost the whole Prezi, almost the whole script, and about half of the research. I was doing so much work because the work wasn’t getting done on time (the little goals that I set myself for this project) and it needed to be done by tomorrow. I will still have to finish some work tonight, but that’s ok because we are nearly done with the whole project! 

Here is a picture of the book we read:

During TAP class in the beginning of the year we talked about doing community and service, one inside school and one outside school. I have done 2 things in school but none outside of school yet. The first one was that since I was in the DJ club, I DJ’d during the Family Fun Fair, and the other thing is that I ushered for Romeo and Juliet. I still need to find something to do outside of school. I have some ideas but still need to take action and do them. For Romeo and Juliet ushering, I ushered for 2 nights and go to watch for one night, and I DJ’d for 1 hour and a half. I think that for the outside of school community and service, I will clean a beach or help in a fundraising or something like helping an organization that comes through school. Which means something like teachers suggest places for outside school action, so I will probably do something that a teacher suggests if I can’t find anything else.

Watch our video for my Hong Kong Heritage documentary about St. Andrews Church.

You can watch this movie in progress at my website.

7D St Andrews Anglican Church 2013 from Nicolas C (Cdnis) on Vimeo.

For this task in English we had to make a story from a real life experience, and later make a presentation about a devices we used or talk about the setting, or how you developed the characters. I learnt many things in this activity, like how to make a story using devices and feel what it’s like to be an author of  a story. It’s really cool that we got to write our own story and use similes and metaphors because they are really cool to use to show the power of something or how bad or good something is. If I could do the presentation again I would definitely put quotes into my presentation because I got one at the end when Ms. Kirchner asked me to find one. I should definitely next time put more quotes and explain them. I would also explain a little bit more on how I crafted one character and maybe not all of the characters, because then I could focus on one and describe their actions and their dialogue. 

I think that overall the process of making the story was really fun because we got to make anything up because there would be no wrong answer in the story because you are the author. I also like all the feedback because it was so helpful and helped my story to improve a lot, and it made a big impact on how the reader pictured the scene in their mind.

I liked that we did lots of questions that involved real life problems and how we learned the easier way to do them, and I enjoyed the dinner table problem. I also like input and output tables because they are so fun to figure out the rule for, and I challenged myself a lot . I learned how to do input and output tables better and I enjoyed it because it was really fun and interesting to learn about how to do the output if the input is x. I’m still not that sure about how to do some word problems, I still have a little bit of trouble doing that because I sometimes don’t understand the question. I also don’t always understand how to do some number sequence rules, because some of them on the test I couldn’t figure out because they were difficult for me, and I tried a lot of different rules but when I knew what the rule is, I realized that I tried half of that rule but didn’t add the other half! Patterns can help us in life because for example the dinner problem can help us find out something like how many people can sit with a certain amount of tables. Or the handshake problem can help us find out how many handshakes will you get from each person shaking every other persons hand once or twice.

This is a picture of the Dinner table problem:

   I have discovered a new species. It’s name is the Green Feathered Oak, and its scientific name is the Quercus Greenus. I have worked on the model of this bird for a week, and have been planning before that for about half a week. I didn’t work too much at home though only because I didn’t want to bring my bird model home because I was scared it would break. I didn’t think that what I did at home was sufficient because I didn’t have my model with me so I couldn’t do so much. I worked on the wings and the feet but ended up not even using them because they didn’t look right on the bird.

   I worked very effectively during class because I made little plans in my head, like doing the painting one day then doing something else another day, and I tried to stay very organized. Overall, I looked at my bird and what I handed in and I thought that I did manage my time well for this project, except for one of the nights before the project was due, I was very stressed out about it. I thought that I wouldn’t finish it on time, but I did!

    I would probably work more on the environment and I would’ve made the tree in my environment (box) bigger so that I could have put the nest into the tree, because that is how it should go. Instead it was on the ground because the tree wasn’t big enough. I would also put a little more feathers on the bird, and make the wings more visible. The strengths of my bird are that they are very strong and they are very light. They also have very light nests so they can carry it quickly with their family. They also have lots of feathers which help them to camouflage into the trees. Their weaknesses is that they have many predators trying to eat them and their eggs. I would assess myself a 5 for Criterion C, because I listed and explained the reasons for the behavioral and structural adaptions. I have related the adaptations to the environment. 

          During the Shi Huang Di unit, I learned a lot about him and his ideas. I learned about his positive and negative achievements, and many things that he did to unify and standardize China. I now know a lot about China and how it has changed over the years. I also learnt many things from doing the poster presentation because each group had a different question to answer and so I learned a lot listening to that. 

        I learnt a lot of skills during this unit. Like how to use C.R.A.P principles in your posters, and how to research with noodletools so that you can make conclusions from your research without copying exactly what it says. I also learnt about how to take notes when listening to other groups present, also something very important I learned about was sentence fluency and making an outline for an essay so that it can be organized and easy to read. When you use sentence fluency you have to make your sentences less choppy and make sure that if people read them out loud it makes sense and they don’t stumble when they read it. When you use an outline, it is easier to write an essay because you are organized with what you write for each paragraph. I think that since I learnt about sentence fluency and using an outline, I have been better at writing more organized and detailed paragraphs.

       A picture of the poster that my group and I made:

     My groups poster is the one in the middle. We learned a lot about contrast because we used many different colours that suited each other. We also learned about alignment because we tried to make things look nice and organized, but some parts didn’t look very aligned. 

In Humanities we are studying Shi Huang Di. I am looking at Health and Social Education as the Area of Interaction because he was a leader that modernized and unified China, and helped them develop power.