Tag Archives: reflective

Blog Post #1 Capstone

We started a new project a few days ago. This project is a really big one. It is the biggest one we ever did this year!  It has a lot of steps to complete it. It’s called Capstone. All of the 5th-grade students in all the schools in the District are working on it. Capstone is when we have to choose a topic and spend a lot of time researching it. We also have to conduct an interview like the last project we did. We need 15 interview questions, 5 sub-questions, and 1 main question. The first thing we did for Capstone was to make a Curriculum Wheel we had to put our topic in the middle and come up with questions, related to our topic. I knew that Capstone was a very big project but I didn’t expect it to have that many steps. When Mrs. Boyer introduced the project to us I was a bit nervous because I didn’t know a lot about it and my friends seemed to know more about this project. At first, I thought that Mrs. Boyer would pick our topics for us but when she announced that we got to pick our own I started liking this project a bit more.

Coming up with a topic was the hardest thing to do for me. I had no idea what to do my capstone on so, I watched some of the other students so that I could get inspired. I changed my topic a lot of times The first one I came up with was ocean pollution because one of my other friends had done that. But then I didn’t want to copy them so I tried to find another great topic. A few days later, I found another topic which was Disneyland. I got this idea from a student that made a presentation on this. But I wasn’t really interested in it so I was on another mission to find another topic again! My next idea I  got inspired when my mom suggested that I could do Paris or the Eiffel Tower. This gave me my third idea: landmarks! I didn’t do this topic because I had to choose one landmark and I didn’t know which one. Finally, I chose a topic that I actually stayed on and one that I liked. It was air pollution. I chose this topic because I was really interested in it, I also wanted other people to know about it and how we could help before it gets worse. Honestly, picking a topic was the most hardest step for me to do so far. 

Before we started researching we needed a research question, but Mrs. Boyer told us that we could come up with our question while we were researching and the purpose of this was to get inspired by the articles and the books. I figured out my research question thanks to the articles I read. When I was reading my 4th article I noticed that all the articles I’d read all talked about two similar things. The cause and effect of air pollution. While I was thinking about this my research question just came to me!  It was, how does air pollution affect our daily life?  I figured that it would have a lot of information about it because all of the articles about air pollution would talk about how it affects us and our daily life. Honestly, finding the main question was not as hard as I thought it was going to be, and I didn’t face any challenges in finding one.

Coming up with sub-questions was harder than coming up with the main question. It was harder for me because I had a lot of them and it was hard to decide which ones I should pick. I really liked all of my choices, and when I asked Mrs. Boyer how many sub-questions we could have she said 5. I was surprised because I was expecting more and 5 didn’t seem a lot.  Once I came up with all my sub-questions, all I had to do was to pick my 5 sub-questions. I picked the ones that were the best and the ones that I could answer with research. One of my sub-questions are what is the cause of air pollution? I picked this because these were one of my two choices for my main question and a lot of articles talked about this. One of my other sub-questions are, how can we help and what are some solutions to solve air pollution? I really like my main question and I’m glad that I could decide on my sub-questions.

Capstone is the end of the year project and I was really scared about starting it. But the farther we go in the project I get more comfortable with it. I can’t wait to finish Capstone!