Category Archives: Social Studies

Capstone Experience Reflection

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When my teacher said we were starting Capstone, I couldn’t believe it. I was so excited! But I knew it would be a long journey. I thought it would take forever to do research, then an essay, then make a script template! And have the final product. But now that I’m done, I feel that it all went by quick. Soon I am going to be presenting my Capstone. The topic of social media and how it affects us.

One of the first parts of the capstone journey was after we chose our topic, we had to do a ton of research. And I mean a ton. We had about two weeks to gather everything and we had a lot of time each day. We took our notes on our Capstone notebook. When I started to research, I tried to organize my notes. I used colors for each sub question and I made it neat. I learned so many things about social media that I didn’t know! More research is always better than less, so to do more research, I spent time at home doing it. One night I spent about an hour. That hour was very useful and got me many pages of research. After that night, I felt I was almost ready to begin the next step. But I still had to do a bit more research. I’ll be honest, at one point it did get very tiring, doing so much research every day. But I got used to it and used my time wisely. A few days later, I was officially ready for the next step, I finished my research early, so I was ahead. The next step was to write an essay filled with all of my research.

The next step was to write an essay. This essay had to be long, but considering how much research I had, I knew it would be long. The essay was to answer your main inquiry question. Mine was “In what ways does social media affect us?” This is what I did my research on. Starting the essay was hard because most people didn’t know what to do for an introduction. My teacher gave us a lesson and showed ideas, so after that I felt better and knew what to do. The body paragraphs were easier because we had all of the research, and we just had to put it in. But it did take long. By the end of it, I had more than 5 pages for my essay! It was easy to put all of my research in the essay but making the wording sound mature and professional was hard to do and had a lot of work put into it. We had many examples of Capstone essays from the past so I got a sense of what to do. Overall the essay was hard, but I really enjoyed writing it. Now, the next step was to make my script. You can look at my essay here.

Picking between a TED Talk or Movie was difficult. I wanted to do a TED Talk because I wanted to present mine out loud and not in a video, but at the same time I thought I wouldn’t be able to memorize everything. And I wanted to do a Movie because I knew I wouldn’t mess up. But I decided to do a TED Talk. When I got my TED Talk script template it was easy because for the narrative, I just copied and pasted my essay in the narrative box. But the next part little did I know would be one of the hardest parts by far. The maximum time your TED Talk could be is 6 minutes. And when I timed my essay, It was more than ten minutes long. So the hardest part was definitely cutting my essay. I had so much good research, it was hard to know what to take out. It took me a long time to figure out how to make 5 pages of words turn into only one page. I thought it would be easy. But oh, was I wrong. But now that part has passed. And its time to really do the script. So after I cut out parts of my essay, I put it into my script template. The way the template was set up was with sections of the words we speak, the time we speak for, the number slide, and what picture we would put in the slide. This part was pretty easy. And after I finished that, it was time to really start getting ready for my presentation. If you want to check out my script look here.

The next part was to create my slideshow. I had to gather many images of different things.I will admit this part was easy. And after that I had to do one of the really hardest parts which was to memorize my whole script. When it came to this part I couldn’t believe I have come this far. But I knew I had to start memorizing. My teacher gave us different strategies to help with memorizing. I chose to print my script, and glue it on postcards. After that I started to memorize. But when I started to memorize, I already remembered my introduction and my first body paragraph. I was surprised, but also happy because it made me think that memorizing would be easy. So I kept memorizing and memorizing. I started to share my presentation to the class, to get feedback. And each time I went up I felt more comfortable every time. When I got to the end of memorizing, I was relieved. Because I will be honest, sometimes when memorizing it was a struggle and hard, so it made me annoyed when I would mess up. But when I finished memorizing,it did not mean I was done. Even though I knew what to say, I still had to know how to speak to the audience, speak clearly, and loud enough for people to hear. This part was easier. I would say memorizing was one of my favorite parts because I was doing hard work and at the end I was proud of it.

It feels like just a day ago I had my first Capstone lesson, but capstone is almost done! I’m proud of how far I’ve come and I’m happy to say this experience has been very fun. What topic would you do if you had Capstone? Would you do a TED Talk or a Movie? If you want to look at my Canva poster with more information about social media look here for my digital trifold. And here for a printable copy. Also, if you want to check out my video of my presentation, look here.

 

Immigration Video Reflection

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Doing my immigration project has been exciting, a bit of a challenge, and fun. I have loved doing this project but there has been challenges. Doing the script has been hard and many other things but overall this project has been good.

Making the video was challenging, and exciting. I already did my narrative, which was the easy part. But then I had to do the script. This was my biggest challenge. For the script I had to think of pictures to put in, and think of what I Had to put in each 6 seconds. Also, we had to time it to make sure it was around 6 seconds in each part. I knew what words I would put in each part, but not what pictures. Also the video would be 2-4 minutes long. So if each part was 6 seconds, and you had to put a picture in each part, I would have to have a lot of pictures. But when I went on to wevideo, they also had videos for me to put. So I ended up only needing a few pictures. When I finished the video I was happy, and proud of my work.

As a result of this project I would say that I have learned much more about my grandpa, and I didn’t know much before this project. This project gave me an opportunity to learn more about my grandpa, and learn more in general. I learned how to interview somebody, create a video based on a person’s life experience, and based off me interviewing them. Doing the video and making it was also fun. And gathering images was something that was hard, but also enjoyable. And having due dates for the project and certain things, made it more exciting for me because I felt like I was doing something important. Which it was. This project was fun, hard, and exciting.

Overall, this project has been a good journey. I have learned from it a lot and I have definitely enjoyed learning more about my grandpa.

Tree Trek

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 Imagine going on a ropes course for a school field trip, hanging on for dear life while your teammates are saying “Come on!” “you got this!” And then… YOU MAKE IT! All of your teammates are so proud and so are you. Isn’t that fun? Well, that’s what happened for me. For one of my fifth grade field trips, we went to a ropes course. Called Bedford Ropes Course. There were five stations, we also split into three groups to go to stations. Some were challenging and some weren’t. But even though it was just games and challenges, we learned a lot. Me and my classmates and the other class learned how to work together, and a lot of other things. So I will be telling you about my experience at bedford ropes.

There were a lot of challenges. But three of my favorites were called the “Indiana Jones”, the Rope bridge challenge, and the Rope swing challenge. The Indiana Jones challenge was  where you would go through a bunch of obstacles. This was fun because it was very challenging, which sometimes makes you want to give up. But instead my team kept on trying and in the end we had a great time. When I felt my feet wobbling I thought to myself This won’t end well. And no surprise, I did fall right after. Also, it was not a teamwork thing but the people that finished guided others and helped them through. The next challenge I liked was called the rope bridge challenge where you would have to make it through the ropes without falling and without touching your teammates feet. This included a lot of teamwork and strategies which made it more fun for me. When some of my teammates said “good job” after I went past someone without touching their feet, it made me feel good. That made me want to try harder because I knew my teammates were counting on me. The last of my favorites was the Rope swing challenge. This was fun since we got to swing on the rope to get to the other side. Although some people didn’t get to go, you could still help by giving advice on how to get to the other side. When we almost had the record of the most people to get to the other side for the day, it made people encourage others more by saying, “You got this!” or “you’re almost there!”  All of the obstacles were fun, but these are the three I would love to go back to sometime.

There were a lot of fun things that I did, but I also learned a lot. Something I learned about myself is that I don’t always have to do things alone. Sometimes people including me get embarrassed when they need help from a person. But after this field trip I realized that if you get help by someone it can sometimes help you become a better person.  I also learned something about my classmates. My friend Lexi is my classmate, we were in the same group for the field trip so I learned a lot about her. I learned that Lexi is very good at obstacles. For example, on the Indiana Jones challenge the one time she went she never fell, but for me, it took me a long time to not even finish the course. Lexi is also very encouraging. When people were having a hard time Lexi said “You got this!” and that made people feel good. Something I learned about teamwork is that it is very important. Most of the time it is much harder to do things without someone by your side. I learned this because when we were doing the challenges after a while I knew that nobody can do any of this without their teammates. So I learned teamwork is very important. I did not expect to learn so much but I ended up learning a ton of facts I didn’t know.

This field trip was very fun for me and I hope I can do something like it again. At the start of the field trip I thought to myself They think this is a challenge? But in the end, I couldn’t believe I did all of that and that I learned so many new things. Would you like this field trip? I think you would. This was a great experience and I am looking forward to more fun field trips for fifth grade.

Home Of The Brave Reflection

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Today I will be talking about Kek from the story Home Of The Brave by Katherine Applegate. Windows and mirrors are similarities and differences, windows are differences and mirrors are similarities. But me and Kek have a lot of windows. So today I will be talking to you about me and Kek’s windows.

One window that me and Kek’s life have is that in Kek’s life he felt very lonely and he was missing his family since he came to the US alone. That is a big window for me because I have always lived with my family. Also, I have never even gone on a plane without my family before. But Kek, he is unsure if his mom is even alive. She is currently not with him and he is missing her. When he goes to the US and is reunited with his extended family he realizes just how much he misses his closer family.

Another window that me and kek’s life have is that in his life he had to get used to technology and the way things work in America. For example, when he tried to wash dishes he put them in the washing machine because he thought that was how you wash them. That is because he was not used to things like that in America since he never did that stuff in his old home . Also, when his friend Hannah gave him coins for the bus he didn’t know it wasn’t a lot so he said “No I can’t take that from you!” So it is hard for him to get used to all of this in the US. But for me, I have lived in America for my whole life so I always understand things. But if I don’t I would learn easily. Now that I’m realizing it must have been very hard for Kek to get used to everything. Especially with none of his family helping him.

Now that I have told you about Kek’s life and our windows do you think you can relate to Kek? Do you have any mirrors with Kek?