Capstone #3

FINALLY! my capstone is DONE! I am so proud of my skills for being a researcher. I am also really proud of my writing skills. I have also improved my speaking skills and am proud of that. Wow, so many things to be proud of!

The process of my research was easy on the finding articles, videos, and interviewers, but it was hard for Me to make the information my own was a whole different story because I am not good with that stuff. also, adding all the information to my script was really hard because it had so much information on crystals and gemstones

I interviewed three amazing people who are experts at either the forming of crystals and gemstones, the jewelry part of crystals and gemstones, or both! they gave me so much information but when I tried to record the first person I interviewed – which was Daphne Lingon – it didn’t work for some reason. because of that, I rushed to get all the information that I remembered down into my notebook. If I had recorded it properly, I think I would have had so much more info.

Making the slideshow for my presentation was challenging but also sort of easy. it was challenging to find the right photo that was actually in creative comms. on the other hand, I knew what I wanted to put I like a picture so that made finding a photo easier but also slightly harder because I looked for a specific thing, and also I typed what I wanted and I ended up with things that were not even related to my topic.

my favorite part of the process of my capstone was writing my script although most things were really thought and hard, even the script writing. the script writing was hard because like I said before, I couldn’t fit all the great information that I had. Because I had a little bit of extra information, I am going to share some of it with you.

  1. Mostly, minerals are expensive because of how popular the mineral is but sometimes it depends on how rare the mineral is.
  2. there is something called a MOHS scale of hardness which is just what its name describes it as, a scale of hardness. it shows which gems are the hardest.
  3. crystals get their color from the atoms trapped inside the crystal.

all the pictures that I found were either creative comms or I found them on Britannica. the resources I used for researching were BrainPOP, Wonderopolis, Ducksters, and some physical books like Earth’s Rocky Past: Crystals, and a book called “Minerals”.

the people who helped me a lot were: Trinity, Camilla, Isabella, Jane, Raiya (myself), Nea, and Elif. A HUGE thank you to Mrs. Boyer (teacher), Daphne Lingon (Interiewie), Myles Feltch (Interiewie), Zamier Kassam (Interiewie), And Sabeen and Hash Mian (my Parents)

overall, I think that capstone was an amazing end-of-year project. it really shows all our skills from the whole school year in just one presentation. it also shows how amazing kids can be sometimes.

Immigration Interview Project

The 5th grade was doing an immigrant interview project, where you had to interview an immigrant that you know. I interviewed my grandmother. she immigrated from Pakistan at age 19 after getting married. she had 4 daughters who then had 9 grandchildren altogether. the process of the interview was hard but also fun.

the process was fun because we got to find pictures to match the slide show and dialogue. it was also fun because it was fun to face the challenges that were struggling. but like I did also say, the challenges WERE struggling and frustrating, but once I got them over with, it felt like I just won first place.

the first thing that I had to do was find and immigrant to interview. this was hard because I have three grandparents at the moment and all of them are immigrants, so I let Camilla (my twin) choose first. she picked my grandpa on my moms side so I picked my grandma on my moms side.

then we had to interview them. the hard part about that was finding a time to face time (because she was in California visiting my coisins). then, when we did find a time to call, I had a little surprise guest, who was very curiose in the interview. it was my cousin Noah. he is seven

Capstone #2

I am a little less than halfway done with my capstone project. I am happy at how far I am and even completed and sent questions to my interviewees.

The first person that I interviewed is a woman named Daphne Lingon. She was very friendly and gave me a lot of information on the properties of gems and what the costs depend on. she was straightforward in planning an interview because she had a lot of time on Saturday. I did too. she gave me information and also recommended a book and a tool to look at. the tool that she gave me is called a loupe and it helps you look closer at minerals. the book that she gave me was a Smithsonian book on gems with a lot about gems. I think that this interview was a success.

The second person who I interviewed was named Myles Felctch. he works with the Maine mineral and gem association as an assistant curator and a staff geologist. I interviewed him over email which means that I sent him my questions and he sent them back with a response. The interview worked out nicely and gave me a lot of information. he understood the questions well and gave me detailed responses. this interview was also a success and not troublesome.

I have a third interview set up for Thursday. I am interviewing a guy that went to my mom’s business school. he created his own company selling gems. my mom told him that I was doing a project called capstone and that I was studying crystals for my capstone. he was happy to help and is going to send me a zoom link so that on Thursday we can call at 5:30.

So far my capstone is going great and I like the progress that I am making. I feel confident in my topic and I am learning a lot.

Capstone #1

At Heathcote Elementary School, all the fifth graders have to do a research project on a topic that they are interested in. This project is called capstone. The topic that I am doing is crystals and gems. So far this project has been really fun and I hope it stays that way. 

Coming up with my topic was hard. At first, I had no idea what to do and kept on switching topics. When I was brainstorming, my mind thought about things that were dug up like fossils and crystals and gems. I put those topics on my list, and after a few minutes, I decided that crystals and gems were actually a really good idea.

The process of coming up with my main question was hard and took a lot of thinking and trial and error. My question is What are the different types of crystals and how do they affect what you can do with them?  I choose this question because I wanted to focus on the business of crystals a.k.a. The jewelry and money that goes into it, but I also wanted to focus on different types of crystals and how different types of crystals and gems are made. Those topics lead me to this question.

I developed my sub-questions by thinking of the topic and the questions I had that lead back to my topic. For example, are crystals, gems and minerals the same? What is the most common form of gemstone that is used by people? And why do some gems have higher value than others?

I’m really excited to learn more about this topic and so far it has been incredibly interesting to dive in, and I have learned some surprising facts already. For example, did you know that amethyst is just purple quartz?

Refugee Question and Answer

While Listening to Refugee by Alan Gantz, my classmates had a few questions and I have some of the answers to the questions.

The first question is if the hotel landlords and owners let Syrians stay, why would they talk so disrespectfully about them? 

I think that The Owners of the hotels let Sirians stay for the money. I don’t think that they liked the Sirians, they probably just knew that refugees are coming and found it as an opportunity to basically force or leave the refugees no choice but to pay for the hotels because the Refugees are desperate and the hotel owners probably know that other hotel owners are going to make them pay too. most hotel owners are just taking advantage of war and people who have no choice, which is a really bad thing to do. Instead, they should have helped the refugee, like Mr. Nasser.

Why is Mahmoud’s father keeping him from getting help? They had no place to stay or sleep.

I think that Mahmoud’s father doesn’t want to have help because he doesn’t want to accept defeat. He probably feels like because he is the man of the family, he should protect his family. he doesn’t want to accept defeat because he feels that he will lose his honor. he might also think that his family is depending on him and will be disappointed. he might also be embraced because Mr. Nassan is a man also and Mahmoud’s father doesn’t want a man – who is older tan him – have to see him need help.

Rube Goldberg #1

In class – and at home – we are working on our Rube Goldberg. a Rube Goldberg is a complex machine that performs a simple task. so far I have my sketch and I have the actual machine complete. my machine might not be the final idea though. the ending doesn’t work that well but I am positive that I will figure it out. I am working with my twin sister on this problem because I think it will be very helpful to have a partner because you can discuss problems and have more ideas. the simple task that we are going to complete is to feed our dog a treat.

when we finished our project, we both felt very accomplished. I was definitely happy. I felt like I had a brick lifted from my back. I was practically smiling from ear to ear – and when I told my parents, they were practically smiling from ear to ear too. when we were working though, it wasn’t the same. I felt really mad and frustrated when an idea wouldn’t work – and that happened A LOT! in the end, I loved my idea and I am excited to try and make it better and work about 99% of the time.

my favorite part of my Rube Goldberg is probably the beginning. the beginning is some sort of pully. It is not exactly a pully but it kind of works as one. basically, you have to open a door, pulling a string attached to it. the string lifts a tube with a gulf ball in it. the gulf ball rolls out and hits a lot of dominos. I really like the setup with that idea but I can’t take credit for it. it was Camilla that was the designer for that idea. I don’t really have a least favorite part of my Rube Goldberg. I love all our ideas and even though some don’t work that well, they are amazing ideas and we will somehow make them work.

It was really hard to come up with our Ideas. we had to do a lot of brainstorming. our ideas were great when we first had them but they would only work about 50% of the time. we had to tweak our ideas and add more parts to make our ideas work all the time.

we had a lot of parts. at some points, I got so excited about using all of them that I forgot about other parts. in reality, we only added a few our the parts that we had. I was really surprised that we had as many parts. basically, all of the parts that we found were in a big closet in the basement.  the closet was full of junk and while some people who are just taking a quick look at it would describe it as a closet full of junk, I could see it as a closet full of machine parts.

in our Rube Goldberg, we used 5 simple machines, but we repeated a lot of them.  we had 3 inclined planes, 2 pulleys, 1 wheel and axel, 1 wedge, and 1 lever. so technically we have 8.

we had a lot of different sketches but we thought that this one is the best.

 

Rube Goldberg #2

My Rube Goldberg is finally done! I finished the machine part- which meant distorting a really cool idea because it didn’t work- and finished the video which was really hard too because I did my Rube Goldberg with my twin and twins fight a lot. The whole experience was frustrating and also really exciting and fun to try and figure out what to do for each part. In the end, we ended up with THREE pulleys, and I thought that that one was going to e the simple machine that we had the least!

The biggest challenge that we faced was the end. for starters, it was really hard to come up with an idea. when we were finally able to come up with our idea, it didn’t work that well. we then had to come up with another idea which wasn’t as cool. then we had a problem with that idea because the ball that we used didn’t fall into a cup. we then had to change the design a little more to make it work. one the sunny side, because we worked so hard on making the end work so well, we only had 10 tries.

we know have 3 pulleys, a lot of inclined planes, and 1 wheel and axel. I think w did a pretty good job of adding simple machines in the right places and were where necessary. the hardest simple machine that we tried to fit in was the lever. I know that might sound crazy to some people but it is true. actually, our last part was the lever and it didn’t work so we had t get rid of it. we changed it to a pully, which worked really well.

our task was giving our dog charlie a treat. finding a way to do that was challenging but after some brainstorming and a few mess-ups, we had a great idea. it was to lift a cup with a treat under it, revealing the treat. our dog was really annoyed when he was waiting for his treat for a long time. he caused a lot of trouble when we wanted him to stay in one place because he is still sort of a puppy so he is not that patient.

overall I am very proud of this project and how we made it. we did a good job with stuff like coming up with ideas and tried to include the other’s ideas somewhere in the machine. I feel like a thing that we could improve on is not fighting over the silliest of things when we were doing the project like whether or not it would work or if we had to add an extra thing. I would like to thank my mom and dad for helping me with filming and helping me to not get really frustrated when something didn’t work and to instead make it better.

Constitution Project Reflection

I think the purpose of this project is to help us learn how to research better. I also think that we did this project because we could learn about the subject that we were going to talk about. I barely knew about the subject that I did my project on but now I’m an expert. I learned really cool and astonishing facts about women’s suffrage and the 19th amendment that I never knew. also, the process was very tricky but also very fun. we got to work with groups to research together and share resources. we also had to check to see if the information we got was correct, which was very hard sometimes.

The process was really hard but also fun. when I worked with my group, we would support each other and give each other resources. sometimes, we would find a resource that we thought was going to be really helpful, but it turned out it was not. we ended up having some different resources and some resources that were the same. In the first video, we had so much information. I had to re-size my text a lot for the notes to fit on the page. then we reached the last resource ad realized that a lot of the information was repeated.

I finished my script really quickly, then I went to show my dad. he said that a lot of it was hard to understand. I think that having someone read your script was really helpful because they help you notice the parts of your script that you can’t understand. also they can help you support and change your script.

Finding the pictures for my slideshow was easy but also hard. for some of the slides I knew what type of picture I was going to add but for some other photos were harder. I think this because some photos just didn’t work for my slideshow and I sometimes couldn’t find the right picture. I also really wanted colorful photos because the subject that I was doing my video on is the 19th amendment so I couldn’t really find colored photos.

My recording was really stressful and it took a lot of tries. whenever I was doing perfectly, someone would walk in, or someone would be too loud. another challenge that happened when I did my recording was when I would mess up. I would stutter a lot, or I would forget to flip my slide. Sometimes I even forgot to reset my slide and start at the beginning. I would not notice that until I would mess up.

In conclusion, I really like this project but also it was really hard and challenging. I got really frustrated and annoyed but also felt very accomplished when I finished one assignment and moved to another. for example when I finished my research and moved on to my script, I felt like a brick got lifted from my shoulder and  I felt really relieved.

The Camp Catastrophe Narrtive Reflection

One writing technique I used in my writing was action and dialogue. one example that I found in my writing is ” soon a counselor came thumping into our bunk with her heavy hiking boots and said in a matter-of-fact sort of way ‘you know if you really feel sick you can go to the nurse right?’… and we did.” Another example that I found in my writing is “‘so cold’ I chattered as I clutched my arms.” 

one area in writing that I need to improve is knowing when to stop and move on to the next part of my story. Sometimes I just work on one part of my story and get so distracted by putting in all the details that I forget to work on the other stuff and also when there is too much detail in paragraphs it might sound really boring. 

One thing that I am most proud of is the detail and description even tho sometimes I get too distracted in t6he details. I tried not to add too few details but also not too much. One of my favorite parts of details in my writing is “It was late so we took our flashlights. We walked down the gravel road. We walked slowly, our tall shadows followed us by the flashlights. “So cold” I shivered as I clutched my arms. “ I really like this part because the reader can imagine what it might look like. 

Holes

I am at the part in Holes where zero and Stanly ran away from came green lake (a camp that is for boys that commit some sort of crime.) at this part I think they have a lot of courage. I also think they are very hopeful. I think this because they just ran away from a camp in the middle of nowhere, climbed up a moutan to get to a rock figure that looked like a thumb, and lived there for about a month by living of unions from the ground, and a hole they dug up with water inside. they also are now climbing back DOWN the mountain to dig up some treasure and get more food. I think they have courage and are hopeful because they did all of that with a hope of succeeding in their plans and living a good life, and their plan isn’t working that well they still have courage and hope.