For the past month my class has been working on our capstone projects and capstone is now coming to an end. It was a long, hard but fun process with many steps, first we needed to chose a topic then do a bit of research on it, after that we needed to interview an expert about our topic then we needed to do more research, and after we needed to combine all our research in attempt to answer out main inquiry question after we did that, we needed to do make our script and then the funnest part getting to make our slideshow for our presentation and then we needed to memorize our script and then the final step of presenting it.
Last blog post I talked about the interview, so now I’m going to tell you about answering my main inquiry question, making my slideshow and making & memorizing my script.
Answering my main inquiry question was a bit hard at first. I didn’t know how to mix all my notes and information I wrote and make them make sense in an essay answering my main inquiry question. My first draft of my essay was good but I knew I could make it better so I edited it and fixed a few things. Mrs.Edwards made partnerships to give and receive feedback, I got paired with my best friend Chloe G. Chloe G is a great writer and gave me really good feedback that helped my essay be a lot better and more organized.
The next step was making our script. Making our script was mostly easy, it was a bit tricky to convert my essay into my script because I needed to choose what I needed to put in my script and what I needed to cut out. Timing was also a bit tricky because I needed my presentation to be under 5 minutes.
The final step was making my slideshow, this was really fun because I got to choose pictures to match what I was saying and bring value to my presentation.
In conclusion this project has been really fun and I cant wait to present it at capcon.
This is a link to my essay: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SQDacCTHo4quZoXZsFlLaGySPG2bpq_U4mMr07Hi6Eo/edit?usp=sharing
This is a link to my slideshow: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JWDXt37uShCxpKKOPgvmJCxwINHsA7Y5-WYozEuaV-I/edit?usp=sharing
A few months ago we started a project called U.S. Regions. The class would be paired into groups and would be assigned a region from the U.S to research. My group got the Mid Atlantic region. I got paired with Chloe k, Rhyse, and Kate. We researched the states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington d.c which is technically not considered a state.
My group decided to have each person research two states in the mid Atlantic region. Since we had 4 people and 7 states everyone got two states and two people had to share one. Chloe k did research on Maryland and New Jersey, Rhyse did research on Virginia and West Virginia, Kate did research on Washington d.c, I did research on Pennsylvania and Kate and I both did research on Delaware.
After researching, It was time to start building our presentation. My group all agreed we should do a slideshow. Making our slideshow was really fun because Ms.Edwards let us do whatever we wanted for our presentation so my group had a lot of fun with it. At first we didn’t really know what to do on our slideshow but before long we started getting some ideas. Our first version of our slideshow looked nothing like our final one because when we made the first version we suddenly had a completely new idea to make our slideshow into so we completely did it over. Our slideshow ended up looking really good and we all really liked it. We put really special touches on the slideshow which made it unique and helped it function and make it interesting. We did stuff like making stuff move when clicked on and linking the slides to other slides to easily go back and forth between slides.
Chloe K had a really good idea of making a Mid Atlantic jeopardy game at the end of our presentation to make it interesting and fun, we also thought that if people knew that there was going to be a jeopardy game at the end they would pay more attention to the presentation so they could win. I offered to make the jeopardy game and I did. Before making the jeopardy, we all finished our part of the presentation so then we could base the questions off of what we were teaching the class about our states. After we all did our slides in the slideshow about each of our states we saw what we were all teaching the class about our states and saw what categories they had in common so we could make the categories of the jeopardy game. Then I made the questions using the categories and the state slides and we were done.
We also had the idea of making a state themed wordle game for each state that everyone could play individually at the end of the day for independent menu.
Presenting the slideshow was really fun and we worked really hard on this project so we were really happy to see that the class enjoyed our presentation.
In my past blog post I have explained that my class is doing a project called capstone. For our capstone project we needed to find someone to interview. I thought that this was the easiest part of the project but a really fun and interesting one too.
Finding who to interview was fortunately really easy for me. Ms.Edwards and the other fifth grade teachers at heathcote gave out a letter to the parents explaining the whole capstone project, when my mom read it she asked me what my topic was and luckily for me I had an uncle who was a film producer, had his own company and knew a lot about CGI. My mom texted him to ask if I could interview him and I emailed two other experts and people that knew a lot about CGI just in case he couldn’t do it or didn’t want to and because we were instructed to contact at least 3 people. The two people I emailed didn’t respond but luckily my uncle Geronimo agreed to do the interview.
The interview went really well. I learned a lot of things that I couldn’t have found in websites, books or articles. Geronimo had really good answers to my questions that I think will really help me a lot with my research. He also helped me understand some parts of my research better, one part of my research mentioned something called a unreal engine and it said that it really helped revolutionize CGI in films which answers part of my main inquiry question but it didn’t really explain or say what the unreal engine was but Geronimo talked about it as part of his answer to a question and he really helped me understand what it was and helped me complete my notes by saying what it is and how it has revolutionized the film industry.
The interview really helped me a lot with my research and I can’t wait to put it all together in the next step of the capstone project process!
A few weeks ago Ms.Edwards told the class that we would be starting a capstone unit. The week that my class started capstone I was unfortunately sick and had the flu but luckily when I got back I was able to catch up. You might be wondering what a capstone is, and thats what im about to explain to you now, a capstone is a project that we do at heathcote towards the end of the year in fifth grade, basically we have to do a presentation about a topic that we get to choose, it’s a fun project but it can also be really challenging sometimes. We can choose what we want our topic to be and choose and plan out our presentation. I already have some ideas for my presentation even though we´re not up to that step yet, and even though we just started I can already tell this is going to be a fun project.
I think coming up with a topic is probably going to be the most challenging step of this project. To help us come up with a topic, my teacher made us fill out a document that had a bunch of questions about ourselves. I think it was really helpful because then I could see what I like and what could form a cool topic. I knew that I wanted my capstone topic to be movie making or something related and the topic I ended up choosing was CGI (computer generated imagery) which is the special effects used in movies. I wanted my topic to have to do something with movie making because movie making really interests me and because I’m an actress. I was originally going to just do movie making overall as my topic but it was too big of a topic so my teacher helped me narrow it down to CGI.
Coming up with my main inquiry question was also challenging and I had to change it a couple times to get the perfect one. Before I narrowed down my topic to CGI I was doing movie making in general as my topic. My first version of my question was ¨ how has movie making evolved overtime?¨ Then after fixing the wording a bit and playing around with it by adding to it I came up with ¨ How has newer technology changed the film industry and how has it helped movie making evolve overtime? ¨ I really liked this question and thought it was perfect until I met with my teacher to get it approved and she helped me narrow my topic down to CGI and change my question to ¨How has Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) revolutionized the film industry?¨ at first i liked the question but I wasn’t really sure if I was completely passionate about it because I really liked my old question, but when I started researching a bit about CGI I found some really cool information and ideas and that made me even more interested in the topic.
At first coming up with sub questions was a bit challenging because at first i thought my topic could just be researched without having to research anything else to figure it out but then I started thinking of the information I wanted to include in my capstone presentation and I started getting some ideas for sub questions like ¨How was CGI invented and used back when they made it?¨ and ¨ What is CGI and how does it work?¨
Overall I’m really excited for this unit because it will be really fun even though it has been a bit challenging. I can’t wait to make my capstone and see my classmates too!
For the last couple weeks my class and I have been doing an immigration WeVideo project. We started the project by asking an immigrant to interview them, then we needed to come up with at least 20 questions. The next day we needed to narrow the questions down to 15, after that we revised the questions with a partner and alone. When our questions were revised and perfect we interviewed the immigrants and then later we asked them for pictures. Then we needed to make a script & plan for our video and the last step of the project was to make our WeVideo with all the pictures had and all the information we learned about our immigrants.
Making the video was really easy since I just had to go off the script and plan I already had for my video. The only thing I had trouble with was uploading one picture of my immigrant, I tried uploading it multiple times and I realized that it wasn’t uploading because I was connected to the wrong WiFi, so my problem was easily fixed. I really liked choosing music that really went along with the story and it didn’t take me long to find it. I also really liked making my WeVideo. Gathering all the information I had learned and matching it with the pictures and adding narration was really cool because it really helped bring the story to life.
This project taught me a lot. I learned a lot of interesting stuff about immigration in general and about my immigrant. I liked learning to conduct an interview because it might help me in the future and if it wasn’t for this project I might not have learned how to conduct it and make it successful. I did learn some new stuff about making the WeVideo but I already knew the basic stuff from working with WeVideo before.
Overall this project was really fun, interesting and it taught me a lot.
A few weeks ago, Ms.Edwards told us that we would be doing a immigration project. Before she explained what we would be doing, I thought it would be something like writing a story about an immigrant or something, but then Ms.Edwards showed us a video of a former student’s project. When we were assigned to interview an immigrant for the project, I was thinking about doing my parents but I didn’t really think they’re story was that interesting, and I knew that my mom knew that her friend’s housekeeper had a really interesting immigration story.
Thinking of questions wasn’t that hard, I just thought of what information I wanted to include in my wevideo later and based my questions off of that. After I ran out of ideas, resources that I found helpful were seeing other students’ questions and I also found a document that ms.edwards shared with us named sample immigration interview questions helpful too. My immigrant only speaks Spanish so I did consider writing the questions on the doc in both English and Spanish but I decided to not do that because I wasn’t quite sure if we were allowed to. Overall I think that writing the questions was one of the easiest steps of this project.
Before conducting my interview, I was a bit nervous. We had agreed to do the interview on friday at 3:35 pm but after my dad picked me up from school my sister wanted to play on the school playground so then I had forgotten that I had my interview, luckily I realized after like 5 minutes of playing on the playground and we went straight home. I texted my immigrant and apologized for being late. I also asked if she could give me a couple minutes to get ready before we called for the interview. She was really nice and we ended up doing the interview at 3:45 a bit late from what we planned but it worked just fine. Conducting the interview wasn’t that hard, I just needed to ask questions and listen. After asking her all the questions on my list I actually started coming up with more specific questions after I knew her story and her responses were really interesting.
Overall, I’m really liking this project so far and I can’t wait to do my we video. I was really intrigued by my immigrant Sandra’s story and i’m really grateful that she decided to share her immigration story with me.
Me & my class had to make rube goldberg machines. A rube goldberg machine is an overly complicated machine designed to do a simple task. The project was overall really fun but challenging and frustrating at times. We had a few requirements for the project like we had to have at least eight steps and three simple machines included in our contraption. In my machine I had ten steps and I used three simple machines such as a wheel and axle, a lever and an inclined plane. In this essay I will be telling you about the final steps of my project process.
When we first started the project I was a bit worried because almost everyone seemed to know exactly what they were going to do but I had no idea. It took me a few days to think but I ended up choosing to make my machine bring me a snack. Although we had many resources I found former students’ videos the most helpful because it set the expectation for me, in a good way so it didn’t make me pressured to do a major machine like an adult. My friends and my parents also helped me brainstorm ideas about what I should make my machine do. I think the research and figuring out what to do my project on was a really hard step.
My final sketch didn’t end up being that different from my first one, I mainly just switched the placements of a few items. In my first sketch, the car hit the cardboard roll, which hit a golf ball to then knock down the dominos, but in my final sketch I made the car hit the dominos, hitting the golf ball, then hitting the cardboard roll. Between my first and final change I definitely made tons of versions of my project until I found the best one which was the one in my final sketch. Originally I wanted the last step to include a pulley to be like a zipline sorta thing to bring me my snack but I ended up using a car going down a ramp to bring me it. The last step was the hardest to figure out because after i figured out making a pulley zipline thing was way too complicated I wanted a domino to turn on a battery powered toy car but that clearly wasn’t going to work so I thought of maybe turning on the car and having something prevent it from moving then having my machine remove that thing preventing it from moving so it could move and push the other car carrying the snack. I ended up having a cardboard roll container push the car making it move.
Making the video was probably the easiest step of the project. I shot the video of my contraptions on many devices from many different angles so the only sort of tricky thing was cutting them and lining them up perfectly so it would look good but it only ended up taking me like five minutes. Ms.Edwards gave us a script to use so we could organize and plan the structure of our video, I found that really helpful. I really liked making my video. Some of my classmates had amazing contraptions & videos. I really liked getting to see everyones completed project.
Overall I really liked this project. It was really fun, challenging and it taught me to never give up.
Heres a link of my finished project: Heres my final sketch:
https://youtu.be/uNBJUjZjyds
A few weeks ago Ms.Edwards told us we would be making a Rube Goldberg machine, I had no absolute idea about what it was but after watching the videos of some rube goldberg machines I knew this would be a cool project. We had many videos for resources including a man named josef’s machines, his videos were amazing. Although Joseph’s videos were really cool the most helpful resources were former students’ videos. This set the expectation for me in a good way, so I wouldn’t get pressured to do a major machine like an adult. So far I’m really excited about my Rube Goldberg project. I decided to make my project bring me a snack. I think it’ll be a bit of a challenge but I think I’m ready.
So far all we’ve done is come up with an idea for our project, make a sketch, take at least 10 photos related to our project and write this, our first blog post about this project . It was a bit hard to come up with an idea at first, but by watching videos and seeing what my classmates were doing I came up with a great idea of my own. I had fun making my sketch but it was definitely tricky to make it, because I had to figure out what can go after a step so it can actually work. With some steps I actually built it to experiment if it could work. I had to re-do my sketch multiple times until I finally made the perfect one. I love my final sketch because I think it meets all the requirements needed so it exceeds project expectations but it’s up to Ms.Edwards to grade it of course. I also love my sketch because I got to show off my artistic abilities making it. I’ve had a little trouble coming up with what I’m going to take 10 pictures of in my project, so far I’ve only had two ideas, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something. Overall I’m loving this project, even if we’re just at the very beginning of it, I think although it’s challenging it’s also fun, interesting and gives students a chance to experiment and learn from mistakes.
Heres my sketch of my project:
In this project we each had to choose an amendment, then we had to choose a person or thing to focus on. I chose the nineteenth amendment and decided to do my project on Lucy stone. I chose the nineteenth amendment because it is the women’s right to vote, and I chose to do Lucy stone because I was inspired by her and all her amazing accomplishments. I wanted to show everyone that both men and women can do amazing things and change the world. The research was the most important part of the project because that was the information I would later be sharing with my classmates and teacher in my final project. I enjoyed researching because in all of the articles, books and videos I watched, I learned something new. After researching we needed to write an essay, I gathered all the information I learned and put it together so that part wasn’t that hard, but it wasn’t easy either because I also had to find out how to word it so it could be perfect. One of the hardest parts of this project for me was making my script. I had to include all the most important information I learned, and have it be timed. After making my script it was time to make my slideshow. I enjoyed looking for pictures to match what I was talking about. I think making my slideshow was my favorite part. The second most hard part was the screencast. I recorded it multiple times because I kept messing up or I knew it could be better. I got two good recordings then I chose the best one.
Overall I really liked this whole project and I think it was a good experience because it will help with my capstone later in the year.
If you want to watch my completed project here’s a link: https://watch.screencastify.com/v/YR4uoz4Meml2RsehoBm6
Feature Article Reflection
by Natalia
I really liked the whole process of writing and creating my feature article, even though some parts were a bit hard. I worked really hard on it, and I’m happy to see that my classmates enjoyed mine.
About a month ago, when Ms.Edwards told us we were going to do feature articles, I immediately knew I wanted to do sharks. I wanted to do this because they are really amazing creatures, and also my favorite animal. I really wanted to show people that sharks aren’t as bad as they think, and I achieved it.
I loved researching. I tried to pick the most interesting and cool facts, and I think I did well. The writing process wasn’t my favorite because I didn’t like having to edit and revise everything at the end but everything else was great.
My title was really easy to come up with since I just named it “Sharks”. I had a lot of ideas for my subtitle, but it was hard to choose between them, so everyone made a Google Form for the whole class to vote on. I ended up phrasing my subtitle “The amazing creatures of the deep”.
Something that worried me the most during the writing process was coming up with the perfect introduction. I couldn’t decide what type of introduction I wanted to do, so I did sort of a mix of different styles of introductions and I loved how it turned out! Another thing that was tricky was figuring out how to make a conclusion that really pieced together the whole feature article. My favorite part of the unit was making my feature article in Google Slideshow. I liked adding all the pictures and seeing it all put together.
I enjoyed the publishing party a lot. I not only got to read almost everyone’s amazing feature articles, but I also got to share mine and get really cool comments. According to all my comments, my classmate’s favorite things in my feature article are: my images, my facts, and my conclusion!
I really enjoyed this whole unit and I hope you like my feature article.