In Humanities, we started a new unit. We are learning about the United Nations. The UN has 8 goals, which they call Millenium Goals. My partner and I chose 2 of the 8 millenium goals to make a graph about why the issue is important and what is the challenge of this goal/issue. We chose the 1st goal: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and the 7th goal: Ensure environmental stability. Our homework was to find an article that relates to ONE of the 2 goals we chose, and I chose to find an article about poverty and hunger. Here is the link to the article: article link

The article is about the UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon discussing about what it takes to end poverty. Ban-Ki Moon talks about how almost 1 billion people go to bed hungry every night, and also states that it’s a horrible and unacceptable situation. Ban-Ki Moon also tells us that they are putting their best effort to build the future they want, to build the future the world wants. The United Nations wants to end this poverty issue by year 2015.

I think that this poverty and huger goal will be met by 2015, because according to some of the PDF files the UN website has included, this goal, Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, the data and progress is getting better every single year. Even though a few countries stayed the same and didn’t change for a few years. I think that the UN has put all the effort in accomplishing the goal the’ve set and is also saying that they WILL accomplish the goal. But the question is since it’s 2013 now, and they only have 2 more years to accomplish this goal, will 2 years be enough time?

We read a book calle The Other Side of Truth. What I liked about the novel was that it describes everything that’s happening very well, and I can picture what’s happening in my mind as I’m reading the book. What I didn’t like about the novel was that there were some parts that I thought was confusing, and I had to re-read it to understand what the author is trying to tell me/the reader. After we read the book, we made a research question on what we topic we chose. For example, I chose to make a presentation about refugees of Syria. I came up with my topic question, and decided if I wanted to work with a partner or do it alone.

My research question is: What help do the Syrian refugees get from other countries?

Based on this research question, my partner and I researched what countries helped the Syrian refugees. We found a lot of related news article about this topic which helped us a lot. Then, we made a Keynote presentation with voiceover which made it way easier for our audience to understand. Instead of  putting a whole paragraph of what we researched, we skimmed the paragraph and chose the important and main bits to include in our presentation. In this project, I think the easiest thing to do is making the presentation since we have all the research done, also doing the voiceover was easy too, since we wrote a script of what we’re going to say. The most difficult thing to do was researching, it took us quite some time to find the right and trustable information and we had to cite or sources if we used the site and took information from it. We used quite a lot of websites for the researching part and we had to spend time on making the NoodleTools notecards because we have to write on the notecard. Another difficult thing was writing the script, we had to think of what we need to say according to our researched information.

Since we made a presentation, we uploaded it to Vimeo this is the link to our presentation: 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are some pictures of our process of the making of our presentation:

Watch this space for my Hong Kong Heritage documentary about 1881 Heritage, which is in Hong Kong. You can watch the movie in progress journal website. But the movie is coming out in April 2013. So you’ll have to wait until next month.

Click here to go to my Google Site about Hong Kong Heritage

We are finally done with the Design Cycle Project, now you can see or completed movie here:

7D Hong Kong 1881 Heritage – Former Marine Fire Station 2013 from Tiffany Wong on Vimeo.

Today is D.E.A.D Day, short for Drop Everything and Design Day. The theme for this D.E.A.D Day is Humanities and Hong Kong Heritage.

We got put into class groups, then we decided which role we were going to play in this design cycle. There were 3 roles: Editor, Videographer, and technical editor. My role was videographer, since I know have quite steady hands and knows how to use most cameras to record videos and/or take pictures.

After that, we got into our groups and found out where we’re going to find Hong Kong’s heritage. We are going to 1881 Heritage. It was a former Marine Police Headquarters. It’s right next to the Star Ferry of Tsim Shat Tsui, YMCA, Hong Kong Space Museum, The Peninsula Hotel etc. I thought that I was very lucky to go there because about a year ago, I visited that historical site and I was quite interested to go again, and now I get to go! 

Then we had a few activities like watch previous year’s Hong Kong Heritage videos on Vimeo. We also gave comments to those videos like what we liked and what they can improve on. It was a fun day and involved a lot of computer. We also made a Google Site and a group Google Doc. 

I thought that this day was fun and I really enjoyed the activities we did and the website we made. I loved it!

Author’s Choice: Short Story Presentation

I learned how to present my short story using the Setting and Sensory Imagery to describe the choices I made. I chose to focus on setting and imagery because those two appeared the most in my story. I described my setting using mood and I put quotes into my presentation to give an example and show my readers what I have changed and added. I also got some feedback from my peers and then I also learned how to help my peers add some imagery to their story. I did my presentation on Keynote.

Here are some examples:

We were studying on the patterns unit in Math class and what I liked the most was that it was easy to understand and the homework were really helpful. What I didn’t like was that some of the input output table rule is kind of difficult to figure out. What I learned well is creating input output tables using the given rule and also figure out the rule using the input output table. I don’t think i have questions for this unit. I think studying patterns is important because it can help us with business rates and with the donations you get from people and you can figure out how much they are paying you. 

In Science class, we were working on on building a bird. Our aim is to pretend to be a scientist and discover a new specie. We had to design a new bird specie. So I thought of an idea to create a small bird but with a lot of interesting structural features. My bird specie is called the Hummingsparrow. The reason why there’s the bird specie ‘Humming’ is because of my birds beak, it’s short but sharp and pointy, so it can peck for the fish in the water. It’s environment is near the water and the Hummingsparrow usually builds a nest near the water so it can get food easily without flying to far or to long. That’s a brief summary of my bird.

The strength and weakness of my bird specie is the weakness, the bird is a bit too small and I can make it a bit bigger so everyone can see it more clearly. The strength is that the bird is eye – catching and more interesting to look at. The colors of my bird is sharp.

The work outside of class is sufficient because I spend 20-30 minutes to work on it every other day and I finish building the bird quite fast. I used my time efficiently in class because I wanted to do my very best and get a good score/mark. Overall, I managed my time well and I finished in time. If I were to start over the project, I would make my bird bigger, get more materials like clay.

Using the rubric, I would give my self a 5 out of 6 in Criterion C.

I had a lot of fun doing this project and I also got good marks. I really want to do something like this in the future.

This is what my bird looks like:

In Humanities class, we learned about Shi Huang-di. We discovered who  Shi Huang-di was and what positive and negative achievements he achieved during his time period. I also learned about how he unified China and what he did to unifying the country. I also learned  that some people thinks that he’s a bad king and some people thought that he was good. During the unit, I learned some skills. I learned how to write a good essay, sentence fluency, how to apply the C.R.A.P design principles to a poster and many other things. 

This is an example from the essay I’m writing.

This is the poster that we created for this unit:

In Humanities class, we are studying about Qin Shi Huang Di. I am looking at the positive and negative sides and to what extent did his achievements help to modernize China. As the Area of Interaction to Health and Social Education.

We are currently learning about A Capella in Music class, these are some YouTube videos that I found which is related to A Cappella:

A Capella-Gangnam Style

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Cappella-Moves Like Jagger

Click here to view the embedded video.

A Cappella-We are Young

Click here to view the embedded video.