Argument and Advocacy Reflection
A little less than a month ago, my teacher, Mrs.Edwards announced that we were going to be doing a debate project with our book club. I was really excited because I love doing debates. Each book club got a folder with articles about their topic, I was a bit disappointed to find out that my group was doing Cell Phones. But later on, when I was doing my research I found out that the Cell Phone debate had pretty solid reasons. The question we were debating was “Should kids be allowed to use cellphones in school.”
My book club group worked really hard on making reasons and evidence for both sides. After we finished all the work Mrs.Edwards gave us sides and teams for the debate. My partner was Christian, we were up against Devon and Trevor. Our side was yes, cell phones should be allowed in school.
Christian and I picked 2 good reasons why cell phones should be in school. The first one was Cell phones can be used as a learning tool, and the second reason was that Cell phones make it easier for kids to keep in touch with their parents. We immediately started working on evidence after we picked our reasons.
I struggled a little when it came to unpacking the evidence but my teacher and Christian helped a lot. My main source of information was an article called pros and cons of having cellphones in school.
After Christian and I finished our evidence we started working on some good counterarguments. Cyberbullying, which was Devon’s reason for why cellphones should not be in school, was hard to counter. This is because there really is no excuse to cyberbully, but Christian and I tried our hardest.
At our first practice debate, we had quite a lot of critiques. We were reading our script on a Chromebook so some people said that we needed to lift our heads up a bit, some said we needed to strengthen our evidence, but mostly we did great. On the last and final recording of our debate, I was anxious, I didn’t know if we were ready. But I shouldn’t have worried because we did a fantastic job.
The debate unit was definitely a hardworking team project. My favorite part of the project was probably researching. I liked finding different ideas for the evidence. I really hope that we do another debate unit in fifth grade.
Rube Goldberg Reflection #1
A couple weeks ago my teacher announced we were going to do our Rube Goldberg project. A Rube Goldberg is a machine that creates a chain reaction to do a simple task. When my teacher announced the project I already knew what a Rube Goldberg was, my sister had done the same project when she was in fifth grade. At first, I was a bit worried about the project, it takes a lot of time and effort to create a Rube Goldberg. I started doing my research with my friends, Cayden, and Luca. We wrote down some supplies, songs, and video format Ideas. After all the research I started working on my sketch. I made a lot of revisions along the way. The final result was this: Car goes down an inclined plane which hits mini skateboard, mini skateboard goes through lego house which hits dominos, dominos hit lego car wheel, lego car wheel goes through magnitle tube and hits lego car wheel which hits big magnitile, big magnitile hits catapult, hamster food gets launched into a bowl. The simple machines I used were an inclined plane, wheel and axle, and a lever. Dominos were really helpful because they could fall down well. But the big car was not helpful because I did not hit the mini skateboard. I think it will be hard to build this but I am up for the challenge.