Category Archives: Social Studies

Capstone – Making My Final Presentation

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After many steps in the Capstone process, it was finally time to make my presentation. The options for my presentation were TED talk, ignite, Adobe Spark Video, WeVideo, and a screencastify. I chose an Adobe Spark Video. I chose this one because I didn’t want to have to deal with the pressure of doing my presentation on top of all the pressure I was already under.

 

The thing I enjoyed most about making my final presentation was that I could really work on my presentation for a while at a time but not get bored because making my presentation was very fun and interesting. This is how I know that I picked a good topic for me, I am interested in it. I also enjoyed seeing my presentation come together step by step until the final product.

 

One challenge that I faced was finding a good picture for what I was talking about. Sometimes I would be looking for a certain picture but I wouldn’t be able to find it, so I would just put a picture of someone sleeping, since that is my topic. The reason why I couldn’t find many pictures that I wanted to use is because I needed to make sure that I had permission from the person that took the picture to use it. To do this, I didn’t need to contact the person, I just needed to set the category on my google search to “Labeled For Reuse” which means that I am allowed to reuse the picture. But, the pictures that are labeled for reuse are usually not as good as the ones that aren’t.

 

Another challenge that I faced was making the slides shorter. I originally had to make each slide last for no more than six seconds which was kind of impossible to do since I wouldn’t even be able to say one of my long sentences in six seconds. So, my teacher allowed me to make some of my slides a little longer and now none of my slides go over ten seconds. But still, I need to talk pretty fast in order to keep my slides under ten seconds.

 

I have mixed feelings on whether or not I’m excited to share my final product because on one hand, what if people do not like it, but on the other hand, what if people really enjoy it. Overall though, I think that it will be fun to know that lots of people are going to watch something that I put a lot of effort into! Here is the link to my final Capstone presentation:

 

Capstone: Interview

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After we figured out all of our questions and started researching, we had to find someone to interview. This process was very hard for me because I kept finding people to interview, but they never responded to me! The first person I contacted was a Professor of Neurology, Mark Nan Wu. He would have been a perfect person for me to interview, but he never responded to my email! Then I called two sleep doctors separately to see if they would respond. They didn’t! Then finally I found another sleep specialist and I emailed her and she replied in half an hour. This just shows that you have to keep trying and never give up!

The person’s name who agreed to let me interview her is Dr. Shelby Harris. She is a sleep specialist. I chose to interview her because my Capstone topic is sleep, and she is a sleep specialist so she knows a lot about sleep. She has a website. If you want to check it out, here’s a link to it:

https://www.drshelbyharris.com/

The process for setting up the interview was very long. I of course had to first find someone to interview, but then I had to do many other things. My interviewee and I had a lot of back and forth emails about what date/time my interview would be, and how we would do it. We couldn’t do it in person for obvious reasons, so at first, we thought he could do a phone conversation where I ask her the questions and she responds through the phone. But then we couldn’t find a date and time that worked for us both, so we ended up doing the interview like this: I sent her the questions through an email, and she responded through another email. Here are the questions that I asked her:

  1. Why did you want to become a sleep specialist?
  2. What did you have to do in order to become a sleep specialist?
  3. What are the most common types of sleep disorders?
  4. What are some signs that someone might have a sleep disorder?
  5. How many hours of sleep should a kid get? Teen? Adults?
  6. What do you like the most about your job?
  7. What do you like the least about your job?
  8. Which stage of sleep is the most important? Why?
  9. What are the rarest types of sleep disorders?
  10. Are sleep disorders able to be cured completely? If so, which ones?
  11. What happens if someone is very sleep-deprived?
  12. What age groups have more sleep disorders or are more sleep-deprived, kids, teens, or adults?
  13. What happens in each stage of sleep?

The most interesting thing that I learned as a result of the interview is that some sleep disorders can be cured, but not all. For example, some sleepwalking and sleeptalking issues can be solved by just making sure you get enough sleep and are practicing proper hygiene, and insomnia and sleep apnea can only sometimes be cured.

Throughout the interview process, there were many challenges such as it was very hard to find someone to interview and figuring out how we were actually going to do the interview. But, I think that coming up with questions was fairly easy. Overall, the interview process was very successful for me!

Capstone: Choosing My Topic and Main Inquiry Question

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My class has recently started a project called Capstone. A Capstone is something where first you think of a topic that interests you, then you make a main inquiry question related to that topic. A main inquiry question is a question related to your topic that is the overall question that you will be trying to answer when you start your research. But, to answer that question you need to come up with sub-questions. Sub questions are questions that you have to answer that will answer your main inquiry question. Then you need to start researching each question. After that is done, you interview an expert on the topic. Once you have done all that, you finally take all the information you have gathered, and you put it in a presentation! In this post, I will be talking about finding my topic and inquiry question.

My topic for Capstone is sleep. I chose this topic because my mom is always saying that sleep is important. So, I wanted to know more about sleep, and every time my mom said how important sleep is, I got more interested, so I chose it for my Capstone topic! At first, I was thinking, Is this topic going to be interesting, I don’t want it to be boring! But then I realized that I thought it was interesting so I stuck to that topic. My main inquiry question is “What are the four stages of sleep and what happens if those stages are disturbed?” Something that was helpful when choosing my main inquiry question is that my teachers helped me, so I knew if it was good or not. If they weren’t helping me, I would always be skeptical throughout Capstone if my main inquiry question was good enough! A challenging part of choosing my main inquiry question is that there are so many different kinds of questions having to do with sleep, that at first, I didn’t know which kind of questions I wanted to use!

Overall, I have learned about myself as a learner that I learn pretty well when I research, and when there is a virtual lesson. I don’t think that learning from home is too much harder than learning in school. It is a little bit harder, but I think I am managing it just fine.

 

Martin Luther King Jr.

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This coming Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. day, it celebrates him as a person and his many achievements in life. In school, we learned all about Martin Luther King Jr. and his achievements in life. I made a timeline with all the important dates and events in his lifetime. It includes events from the dates of January 15, 1929 to April 9, 1968. This is it:

Martin Luther King Jr. Timeline

Date Event
January 15, 1929 BORN

Martin Luther King Jr, was born in Atlanta, GA
September 20, 1944 COLLEGE

Martin Luther King Jr, enrolls at Morehouse College
February 25, 1948 ASSISTANT PASTOR

Martin Luther King Jr, becomes an assistant pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, his father’s church
June 8, 1948 COLLEGE GRADUATE

Martin Luther King Jr, graduates from Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in sociology
September 14, 1948 CROZER

Martin Luther King Jr, enters Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, PA
January, 1958 CORETTA SCOTT

Martin Luther King Jr, meets Coretta Scott in Boston
June 18, 1953 MARRIAGE

Martin Luther King Jr, gets married to Coretta Scott near Marion, Ala
December 5, 1955 PRESIDENT

Martin Luther King Jr is named president of the Montgomery Improvement Association
January 30, 1956 BOMBED

Martin Luther King Jr’s home was bombed, no one was harmed
February 18, 1957 TIME

Martin Luther King Jr, appears on the cover on the Time Magazine
May 17, 1957 SPEECH

Martin Luther King Jr, delivers his first national address, “Give Us the Ballot”
September 20, 1958 STABBED

Martin Luther King Jr, is stabbed at a book signing with a letter opener by a mentally ill woman but he lived
February 1, 1960 MOVES

Martin Luther King Jr, moves to Atlanta to focus on the civil rights struggle
October 19, 1960 ARRESTED

Martin Luther King Jr, is arrested at a sit-in demonstration at a department store

 

December 16, 1961 ARRESTED

Martin Luther King Jr, and many others were arrested in a desegregation campaign
April 16, 1963 LETTER

Martin Luther King Jr, after being arrested wrote his famous Letter From a Birmingham
August 28, 1963 SPEECH

Martin Luther King Jr, gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial
December 10, 1964 PRIZE

Martin Luther King Jr, wins the Nobel Peace Prize
August 12, 1965 SPEECH

Martin Luther King Jr, leads civil rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery
January 26, 1966 MOVES

Martin Luther King Jr, moves to a Chicago apartment to demand better housing and education
December 4, 1967 PLANS

Martin Luther King Jr, unveils plans for a Poor People’s Campaign
March 23, 1968 MARCH

Martin Luther King Jr, leads 6,00 people in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. It ends in violence and looting
April 3, 1968 SPEECH

Martin Luther King delivers his final speech “I’ve been to the Mountaintop”
April 4, 1968 DEATH

Martin Luther King Jr, was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel
April 9, 1968 BURIAL

Martin Luther King Jr, was buried in Atlanta

 

Martin Luther King has achieved many things, and done many speeches. He delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a very motivational speech, it really made a big impact on those who wanted segregation. Think about it, if Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t stood up for civil rights, had he not spoken out, things just might be the same now as they were back then. In his speech, Martin Luther King Jr, said “all men are created equal,” thanks to him, there are.

American Revolution Political Cartoon

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This is a political cartoon about The Midnight Ride, but Paul Revere stops to eat a snack while British soldiers pass him, therefore it is called “The Midnight Snack”.

I choose to do my political cartoon about this because I thought of all of the major events of the American Revolution and I chose The Midnight Ride. Then I thought about how I could add some humor to it, I came up with “The Midnight Snack”. I am doing this project in the perspective of a loyalist so I showed how Paul Revere did a bad job. This is what I came up with.

 

Colony Reflection

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When I created a colony poster, I learned not to use very many words, and that each person in the colony has something different to say about it, depending on what job they have. When I  made my colony, I learned to work together and listen to everyone else’s ideas, since we worked in a group. I also learned that since I was working on the Southern colony, my group and I needed to include things that you would’ve found in the Southern colonies. My poster connects to my colony because I mention that we have very successful crops, and we put lots of crops on the colony. Also, I mention cotton tobacco and corn, and in my colony, we put lots of those crops on it.

Southern colony poster in a plantation owner’s perspective.

Explorer Infographic

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I made an infographic about an explorer. My explorer is Leif Eriksson. In this project, I had to gather facts about Leif Eriksson on a padlet. Then, I had to take that information and put it into an infographic. An infographic is a way to show information in pictures too. It took a lot of editing, but it was really fun. An infographic is a way to show information in pictures too.

Here it is…

Research Projects

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In reading, we have been studying how to research. My group studied snakes. We came up with subtopics which were habitat, body parts, defense and prey. To make our research easier and more organized, we put our books in order from easiest to hardest. To find our subtopics, we looked in the books to see what topics appeared the most. Those were our subtopics. I learned to not completely copy what we saw in the book, and that I should write down my own ideas based on what I was reading. When we got all our information, we made a animal comic book! I put in some of the research from each subtopic. Then I found pictures, and made captions for them. The pictures all had snakes in them, so I made the snakes saying a fact that relates to the caption and the picture.

 

After this project, I took everything I leaned about research and used that in my country research project. I wanted to study Brazil, but I knew nothing about it so I needed a lot of research! To find research, I went to the library databases and did a google search at home. I found research that fit into the categories of the cultural universals which are Politics, Social Aspects, Economy, Beliefs and Cultural Arts. I put it all together to make it into a Comic Tour Guide Book titled The Cultural Universals of Brazil. My favorite part was learning about Brazil and putting it into a book in a fun way. The challenging part was organizing the pictures and captions into a good format.