Category Archives: 5th Grade

Capstone Blog Post #3 – Creating Final Project

Posted on by
Reply

Capstone Blog Post #3

This year in class we have been working on a project called Capstone. This blog post is about making the project.

For the project, we had to choose the format from the following: Video, Screencast, TED Talk, and Ignite. In the end, I chose Spark Video because I felt that it would be the most convenient thing to do while at home. I also chose it because I really enjoyed using the platform the last time I used it, during our immigration unit. 

There was a lot of fun parts to creating my final project, one of these things was doing the voiceover for my project. I liked this because it was fun to share the information that I had spent so long researching. Another fun part was writing my script. I liked writing it because it was fun to craft my information into a digestible presentation.

During my process of creating the final project, a challenge was that it was hard to find images that could really help my project get to the next level, but after a lot of searching, I found the right photos.

For the final share, I am extremely excited. If I was doing a presentation, I may feel nervous, but since a did a video, I got to show it to my class first to get feedback and see what someone would think after seeing my video. I am excited because I love to show my work to others.

In conclusion, Capstone has been a great experience, and it was really fun for me to learn about a topic I am passionate about. Here is my final project:

Capstone Blog Post 2 – Interview

Posted on by
Reply

As I have mentioned in an earlier post, in class we are working on a project called Capstone, this post will be about my interview for the project.

 

To start the interview process I had a zoom meeting with my teacher about who I would like to interview. This process was easy for me because my mom works in the medical field so she has a lot of connections with people who are well informed on my topic: Vaccines. In the end, I decided to interview Holly Gilbert, an infectious disease specialist. I interviewed Holly because I figured that she would know a lot about the immune system, and vaccines, because of her profession.

 

After securing the interview, my interviewee requested that I send her the questions before we do the zoom call. This allowed us to have a smoother and more informative interview because she could think about how she would answer, before the interview.

 

For the actual interview, I had a document open with my questions and an area to write the questions. I also had two devices recording the audio for the interview, because, for another project that I did an interview, the recording crashed on a device. At the end of the interview, I looked at my notes and refined them, because I had to type fast, so it was sloppy. 

 

One of the most interesting things I learned as a result of my interview is that the administration of a vaccine matters a lot. Some vaccines go through the buttocks, most go through the muscles. A lot of vaccines work best on the area below your muscle.

 

One challenge that I faced during the interview process was coming up with questions. It seems simple right? Wrong. My goal for creating my questions was to find out information that I could not find on the web, which is hard to do but I managed.

 

Overall my interview process went very well, I gained a lot of information and I would classify it as a success!

Capstone Blog Post 1 – Task Definition

Posted on by
Reply

In class, we are working on a year-end project called Capstone. Capstone is a research project where we have to choose a topic and learn all about it, eventually, we will put it into a presentation and present it to an audience. This is blog post one, this blog post will be about the task definition of the research process. For my Capstone, after a lot of thinking and comparing I chose Vaccines as my topic. For this topic, we were assigned to make the main inquiry question which will guide us through research, and ultimately is our goal to answer. My main inquiry question is, what is involved in vaccines’ development and testing, how do they affect the human body’s immune system, and what are the primary challenges for administering vaccines?

 

During the experience of deciding my main inquiry question, one thing that was very helpful for me is that my teachers, my parents, and everyone around me were helping me. They were helping me the word and helping me come up with and develop my main inquiry question. Another thing that would help her for me while developing my question was that I had a private lesson with my teacher, where I could talk about my main inquiry question, and make changes to it. Another thing that was helpful was I had an organizer doc, which helped me organize my ideas and communicate with my teacher. To summarize, mostly what helped me was communication with people around me.

 

One thing that was challenging during my Capstone main inquiry question brainstorming process was zeroing in on one area of vaccines because vaccines are a very broad topic. I was helped with this by getting advice from my peers, my teachers, and my parents. Another challenge I had faced was wording my question to be equivalent to a level 4 question, this was because I have to include some level of opinion in the questions’ speculated answer to get it to that level, which was hard but in the end, I got it done.

 

During this process what I have learned of myself as a learner is that I learn better if I have some kind of background to that topic. I mean this in the terms that, to make a  main inquiry question I had to do some background research to create a better question. I have also discovered that I think better when my ideas are organized. I know this because the organizer doc that was provided really helped me organize my ideas, which helped me think. In future projects, I will definitely be utilizing the information I have found out about myself as a learner. 

 

Overall this project has been awesome thanks to the help of my teachers, my parents, and my peers. I look forward to the rest of this project and what I am going to learn in the days to come.

MLK. JR

Posted on by
Reply

Monday is MLK day so today I have put together a summary of his life. Michel Luther King Jr was born on January 15, 1929 (he later changed his name to martin). Martin was a very religious man and become a pastor on February 25, 1948. He also got married to Correa Scott on June 18, 1953. Also related to religion he got his doctorate in systematic theology in June of 1955. On December 5, 1955 he became president of the Montgomery Improvement Society (MIA) after the Rosa Parks incident. Because he was a civil rights leader in the south, he received a lot of hate, so his house got bombed and received a threatening phone call at the end of January 1956. After a long hard battle the United States Supreme Court declared bus segregation unconstitutional on November 13, 1956. In 1957 he delivered his first national address and in 1958 he and other civil rights leaders met with president Dwight. D Eisenhower. On September 20, 1958 he was at a book signing in Harlem and got stabbed, but survived the accident. During this time it was very common for police officers to get involved in demonstrations, and Martin was arrested but was released soon after. On August 28, 1963 he delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech and, soon after segregation was outlawed. In 1964 he was named the Time man of the year, and won the Nobel peace prize. His life came to a tragic end on April 4, 1968 when he was shot and killed on his balcony.

Unit Reflection: Rocketry

Posted on by
Reply

Now that the rocketry unit is coming to a close, it is about time to reflect on the unit in general. Overall I learned a lot about teamwork and rocketry. One example is that I learned that sometimes you have to let other people what they want when you’re in a group. I also learned that rocketry is all about the engineering design process, because you need to take inspiration before you retry a idea. I also learned a lot about fine tuning and building a google slides presentation.

During this project I had things that I liked and others that I did not. One of the things I enjoyed was building the Rocket, because it was fun using the design we made. I did not enjoy designing Rocket #1 because we argued a lot. I think that launching and graphing rocket #2 was really disappointing for me because we did the worst we have ever done.

All in all, In loved the rocketry unit and hope we can do it again. Plus, now I can say to people “This ain’t rocket science!”

Designing and Building Rocket #3

Posted on by
Reply

Today we were designing and building rocket #3. In this design we were allowed to change one thing from our last design, we decided to change the nose cone. Now instead of the nose cone being on the inside, it is now on the outside. We decided to change this feature because we noticed that the nosecone crumpled on itself in the previous launch.

Designing our third rocket was really easy. I think that it was really easy because we already knew exactly what to do. In this design we really did not run into any problems. Something that proves this is that the design took us only 10 minutes to make. The design we chose is a design that has 3 fins, a long and thin nose cone, and a thin and straight body.

Building our third rocket went mostly well. We did really good taping and hot glueing, also the fin measurements were very precise. The nosecone of this rocket did not go very well, because someone in our group put the nosecone on the wrong rocket. I think the reason that this rocket was so easy to build was because we already knew what to do, and more.

This, being a group project required a lot of collaboration. Our collaboration during this portion of the project was very good, but it had its lows. For example, when we were designing and building we had good collaboration, but when we were choosing our jobs for the launch, we argued a lot. Overall it went pretty smoothly and I am looking forward to the launch.

 

Launching and Graphing Rocket #2

Posted on by
Reply

Last week we were launching our first rocket, I had high hopes for the launch because we had improved our rocket a lot from the last launch

Our launch went very well. Our rocket went pretty high and my job was fun. For this rocket launch the job I was assigned was pumper, the pumper is the person who is in charge if pumping the air in to the rocket to create pressure that will be released when the chamber opens. Pumping the rocket was very easy and I pumped it up to exactly 50 PSI. Being a clinometer reader this time was fun, but easier than last time because we did the launch on a cloudy day, but on the first launch it was sunny.

The graphing portion of Rocket #2 was impressive but disappointing. When we graphed our score using the graphing paper we saw that our rocket went 16ft less then it did last time. We were very disappointed about it but we are going to push threw and do good next time, we plan on doing this by putting the nosecone on the outside instead. We think that this will help because we noticed that the nosecone crumpled in on the last launch.

Cooperation during this portion of the project was pretty smooth. Our group worked really well together and we launched with no arguments. On the graphing stage we also cooperated pretty well. I think that it went smoothly because we always agreed on everything.

Designing and Building Rocket #2

Posted on by
Reply

Today in class we designed and built our second rocket design, in this design we were allowed to change only one thing from our last design (See Building and Designing Rocket 1).

In our second design the part that we are choosing to change is the fins, we are making it so that the fins are bigger and now there is only three of them. We chose to make this change because we thought that three would be balanced like 4, except lighter because there is one less. We decided to make them bigger because the group that made them big got higher than we did.

For our design we decided to go with a sleek body, and a thin long nosecone, we thought that this will help so the air can flow smoothly. The design process was easier this time than last time, because we already knew what to do.

During the building we decided to put hot glue in the edges on the fins, to keep them on, we also noticed from last launch, that the inside crumpled from the air pressure, so this time we put tape on the inside. Just like the design we did this much more efficiently and fast than last time.

Collaboration during the building and designing of rocket 2 had its highs and lows. For example, during the choosing of what we were going to choose, we collaborated very well, but in the start of the building process we did not. But for the most part, our group collaborated well.

Our Rocket Design

Launching and Graphing rocket #1

Posted on by
Reply

In class we are doing a rocketry unit. Today was the launch and graph phase. When we launched our rocket we had to measure the distance from the launching platform to the clinometer station, we did this using a trundle wheel. I think that our launch stood out from all the others, because at first our nosecone popped off and then we went inside to repair it and then launched again, coming 3rd. Our launch also stood out because we had four fins instead of three. We all had jobs to help with the launches, for example I was the count down master, one person in my group was the pumper, and the other was the person who pressed the button to launch the rocket. I liked being the countdown master because it was my job to release all the anticipation with only one word, “Release!”

After launching the rocket we had to start graphing our rockets data, using a graphing sheet, our rocket went 146ft! Wow! After graphing and examining the pros and cons of our rocket we decided to to make the amount of fins three instead of four. We thought that this might be a good idea because the group that came first used three. Also three might weigh less then four, but be just as balanced.

Our team’s collaboration during the launch was phenomenal, we were perfect, and when we had to rebuild we were all in sync with each other and collaborated perfectly, same goes for the graphing stage. For example we had to hot glue on a really tight time zone but we did it on time.

Us launching the rocket

Identity Bags and Maps

Posted on by
Reply

Identity bags are bags full of objects that represent you, your interests, and even your possessions. I enjoyed doing identity bags because it let us share a tiny part of ourselves with our classmates, I liked this because there are some things that don’t reveal themselves during the school year. One example is that I had no idea that Gabe Co-piloted a plane, or that Ryan did taekwondo. It was also fun being able to show people some of your talents, like a trophy or a medal, or even an object. Also you get to ask people questions and learn more about them as a person. Overall I really enjoyed this project, and definitely would like to do it more in the future.

Identity maps was really fun and interesting because we kinda got to learn about ourselves, because there is a lot of things I had to think about to fill in all of the space. So it kind of reminded us of stuff we forgot about. One example is I had to think “What color are my eyes?”. I also learned a lot about my classmates, just like in the identity bags. As fun as it was there was also a few challenges like when I had five left and I could not think of anything so I had to really think about other things that define me.