Field Trip on the County Board of Legislators

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“Clomp! Clomp! Clomp!” The Gavel silenced the chamber as it hit against the sound block. “I now call this meeting to order!” The head chairman turns on his microphone and everybody’s eyes are on him.“Today’s problem is, ‘Banning junk food and vending machines from schools in Westchester County,’” He reads off a piece of paper. You have thoughts bubbling in your brain and you can’t wait to share them with everybody else in the room. “Any ideas?” The Head chairman says again. Everybody’s hands shoot up, including yours. The Head Chairman calls on a couple of people around you and then, he calls on you. You begin to turn on your microphone. “Hello?” You say and your voice echoes in the large room. If you want to hear my opinion on the case of banning junk and unhealthy foods or not, keep reading this blog post. In this article you will learn about two things that I have learned from the field trip and my two favorite parts about it!

At the county board of legislators two things I learned was that in a committee discussion, as the chair woman you don’t state your opinion until all of the other legislators say theirs, and I learned about the order in which a chamber discussion takes place. To begin at the beginning of the field trip we went to the committee room. This was an office where the bill that was introduced is at its first step. I was a chairperson and I had to learn that I don’t vote on the topic we were introduced with until everybody else has made their point. This is necessary because as a chairperson you have a lot of power, and most people would be influenced by you, so if you did it wouldn’t be a fair vote. Moving on, another thing we learned was how you discuss and vote in the chamber. Starting from the beginning the clerks do a roll call to make sure that they have everyone so it’s a fair vote. Then the head chairman calls the discussion to order. You go around and everybody needs to get a turn to speak and share their opinion. We learned that you always have to discuss before you vote so that you can try to convince other people to vote on your opinion, or so maybe somebody else will change your opinion. After everybody has had a chance to share their ideas (not their vote) the clerks go around and everybody votes to either move the law to the next step or to get rid of it. For example I realized during the mock case that in the beginning of the trial and at the end the clerks (Kristen and Graydon) actually did the roll call and tallied the votes. In the end we did not move the law forward to the next step but even though it wasn’t a real case it made the whole thing feel very realistic. Once everybody has voted the head chairman closes the case and the meeting ends and everybody leaves.

The two things that I most enjoyed about taking the role of a legislator and a chairperson was learning the process of my job, and when in the chamber being able to share my ideas with the other legislators in the room. To start being the chairperson was super exciting and fun. The process of it was even more thrilling. First off I would call the discussion to order. I would introduce the case (the other legislators would also have it on their paper) and I would call on people to share their ideas and another part that made it real was we would call each other, “Legislator …” or, “Chair…”. Next I got to tally up the votes and everybody voted that the law did not go to the next step. If it didn’t the law would be gone but if it did it would go to the chambers, and that is where we went next. When you walk in the room there are two walls that are rows of chairs. If you keep going forward right after to the two platforms of chairs there are two stages with desks on them, that’s where the legislators sat. In the center there is a desk where the clerks sat that is elevated, and even above that was where the head chairman sat. The desks where the legislators sat all had microphones, it was so we could all hear each other and so we weren’t all shouting over each other.There are 4 jobs. The 4 jobs are, two clerks, a head chairperson, a public speaker, and a legislator. The Clerks tally up the votes at the end and they do the roll call, and the public speaker is somebody from the public, and they come in to share their opinion about the subject. In the beginning the head chairman spoke into his microphone, in a loud, clear voice. “Head chairman, Dean?” One of the clerks spoke into their microphone. “Present,” He responded. “Legislator Olek?” When the roll call is over the head chairman turns back on his microphone and everybody’s eyes are on him. Personally, I thought that they should not ban junk foods and vending machines at schools. I thought this because while other people’s arguments were very convincing I think that the school shouldn’t be worrying about or be able to control how much sugar the students consume. I think that should be up to their legal guardian, and the child, not the school. This is the part that I enjoyed the most, when we all shared our ideas my mind was going back and forth. I liked that I hopefully was able to convince other people about my ideas, and for a little while other people convinced me.

To conclude, I really enjoyed taking a field trip to the county board of legislators. Now you know two things I learned about there, and two of my favorite things we did. I love going on field trips and the fact that it was about our county government made it even cooler. What do you know about your county government? 

   

 

AmRev Blog Post #2

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In social studies, as we progress I find that I am more independent, that I am pushing myself to make sure my project is to its fullest. As we are entering the last phase of the project I feel very complete and proud of myself for doing all of this hard work. Not only am I proud of myself, but I am also proud of my classmates for pushing through and cooperating with each other. 

At the start of this project I didn’t think about it for what it really was, by that I mean I didn’t realize what a big deal this was. Now as we are getting closer and closer to presenting I feel what a big accomplishment this will be for me. Reflecting back to the process of making this happen, my favorite part was rehearsing with the slideshow, and really making my presentation special. A part of this process that I felt I needed more help with, and struggled with was memorizing my script and finding the pictures. The only problem with finding pictures was that we could only use pictures that were creative commons licenses so that we wouldn’t be stealing the pictures from people. In the beginning of the research I wanted to choose a topic that really, nobody else would choose, I wanted this presentation to be different. I didn’t want my project to be remembered as another one of the Boston Massacre presentations, or something that everyone else was doing. That’s why I chose Women During The American Revolution. I wanted to begin preparing for capstone next year. So not only did I choose to present my information as a TED Talk because I will be doing one next year, I have decided for capstone I want to study about the evolution of women’s fashion and makeup. My topic this year helped me because I got to research a little bit about women’s fashion during that time period, and now I feel a little bit more prepared for capstone. I think that presenting this year will help me improve at my public speaking, and feel less scared to perform in front of people. Going back to the beginning of the project, the research part of the project, I learned that getting the information wasn’t the hard part, but turning the information I found into my own words and putting it into my narrative and research really challenged me. The easier parts of this was starting my narrative given my love for writing, and organizing my notes before turning them into a narrative. Overall this project has been an amazing experience, and I really hope after capstone, I will have more opportunities to do something like this again.

AmRev Blog Post #1

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For my AmRev project I wanted to study women’s roles in the revolution and how women changed over the war. At first it was hard to find resources to use because I was studying a topic most people weren’t. I just started to search for things on google and see what I found. Well, I can safely say that the chunk of information that pops up on the top of the google page is not the most reliable thing to use. After finding that google is not the most reliable thing to use I decided to go broad and just search for women’s roles in the American Revolution. I have to say, that went pretty well. I found a bunch of resources that led me to really planning out how I wanted to organize my notes. Anahita also introduced me to a really good website called Museum of the American Revolution, that website really helped me figure everything out when I was kind of lost. Then to help me even more Mrs. Rago made a document with everybody’s focus and some websites that I might want to look at, and I just want to say thank you Mrs. Rago and Mrs. O’ Neill for all of this help on my project so far. The only thing I regret doing is focusing too much on the clothing, and women at home rather than studying more specific women who fought in the war, If I could have gone back I would have probably started with studying specific women such as Abigail Adams, or Martha Washington, but I didn’t get into that until much later in the process. I really like my topic because I wanted to think out of the box so I did something to help with my capstone and that was interesting to me. I felt very passionate about my gender and I wanted to research what my life as being female would be like if I had lived in the revolutionary period. I think this topic was a good one because it also challenged me, and if you know me, I love a good challenge. I learned about women’s jobs in general but I wanted to learn more about women who actually experienced that, and tell their story. I felt that telling their story would kind of be remembering them and recognizing all of those incredible acts they did for our country. My topic is all about women’s jobs and all of the hard work they did to prove that they did not get as much recognition as they should have, and that the American Revolution was kind of a starting point for them fighting for their recognition and their legal rights. As we are moving into the scripting process and memorizing lines I honestly feel a bit nervous. I only feel this way because when we did our weather ignites it was hard for me to memorize those 30 seconds of speaking at first so I can’t imagine how this will be. Otherwise, I am so excited and I just want to keep my mindset positive, and hope for the best.  

 

Extreme Weather Reflection

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Ever since I was a little kid I’ve always been terrified of all natural disasters including hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, so when we got into our weather unit I was prepared.

Being in fourth grade I knew that these things just sort of happen, there is no way to prevent them but when I heard I had to study about them I felt a rush of excitement dash through my body! I thought maybe if I know more about them it will make it less scary. I’ve always wanted to know more about tsunamis so that was an option but I don’t live near the coast so knowing how to stay safe didn’t really help with my fear. Some information I learned about tsunamis helped me decide on my final natural disaster. I learned that tsunamis are triggered by something much greater, earthquakes. I was so intrigued by this, I knew this was the topic I wanted to study. Seeing the people’s names that were in my group written on the board made me smile but I knew this group could get extremely silly sometimes. Aside from that, when we heard about who was doing which subtopic in our group I thought this was going to be as easy as one two three, I thought wrong. I thought I had put my foot down on the cause. I loved fantasizing about myself talking in front of everybody’s parents chitter chatting away about tectonic plates. I was going to get the causes of earthquakes, but once again, I thought wrong. Apparently someone in my group also wanted to be causes, I knew this was not going to be a, 

“I want it,”

“OK you can have it then,” argument. I knew this was going to have to be settled in an old fashion way, rock paper, scissors. Yes, it was intense.

First round…TIE

Second round… I lost

I played like a good sport and that’s when I went to my second choice, measurement. I thought on the bright side about how when I took my reading level test I read a book on earthquakes! The one thing I can remember was something called the Richter Scale. Wow, I was already off to a head start and we hadn’t even started research.

 

When I first went out into the hallway with my group I immediately knew this group was going to be a chatty one. At first I couldn’t find that much information so I just went to google and searched up specific things. Every morning for a couple days we would come into class and look for books about our topic but I couldn’t find the information that I wanted so I stuck to the internet. To help, I tried sketching, and I think that was a plus for me. Two days later I was planning out what both of my slides would be about. First I said that one slide should be about the seismograph and the other should be comparing and contrasting the Richter Scale and the Moment Magnitude Scale, and it turns out, that really stuck. I was definitely able to go back and use a ton of notes and then I got to take that information and put it into my narrative. When I said this group was going to be a chatty one, I was right. I tried to support them but after a little while I got sucked into the world of chattiness. I tried to take control of the group and tell them to focus and that worked for a little while, a very little while. Two seconds later they were chatting away but at this point it didn’t matter that much to me.

 

When I got all of my information down it was pretty easy to write my narrative because it was basically just a big brain dump. I wrote a pretty nice introduction to go along with it too. I mostly just wrote about the Seismograph, The Moment Magnitude Scale, and the Richter Scale, because I knew that’s what my slides were going to be about.

Turning my narrative into a script was an interesting process. I have something called W.T.M.D it stands for Writes Too Much Disorder (just kidding, that’s not a real thing). It’s difficult for me to get rid of any of my writing so when I took my 7 paragraph narrative and put into my two fifteen second slides I had to get rid of a lot. I had to narrow it down to one to two sentences which as you might assume, took me a while. I had to time myself multiple times to see if each slide was 15 seconds. The rule about this presentation is that you work in groups with four to five people. Each person gets a subtopic about your extreme weather that your group got chosen with. Each person has two slides in the presentation to talk all about their subtopic, and when it all comes together it’s one big presentation about your extreme weather topic. If you don’t remember I got earthquakes and my subtopic was how they are measured. After I made my actual script, I took on an even greater challenge. I chose to say and write the whole introduction. It was 15 seconds just like the other slides so in total I had 45 seconds to speak. I decided to fill these slides with examples of seismographs and two other scales. After we got the info down and the timing correctly I had to memorize my two 15 second slides. After I finished reading it over and over I finally wrote the introduction and now I had to memorize all of that. It was a big challenge but I was determined now and I was not putting all of this hard work to waste. For days, and days I practiced and practiced. I had finally known my script by heart. When Mrs. Rago showed us what the Ignite would look like when we were done, I liked how the pictures switched when each person talked. Now I know that I have to put in pictures to match my words, just another bump in the road. I know you might think, “Oh pictures, easy peasy lemon squeezy!” but this was far from that. When I walked into the computer lab, Mr. Casal told us to put in pictures to match our words, so I thought what you would have thought, “Easy! No problem.” It was far from easy. When I first searched for a seismograph it was actually pretty easy but when I looked for the two scales it was a long way down. I kept seeing confusing pictures. It was either too many words or just straight up confusing with no words. Eventually I switched some information in my script to match the picture so now I had to get used to my tweaked script, it really wasn’t a big difference so it didn’t take me a long time to re-memorize it. Now I had put the slides to switch every fifteen seconds and was rehearsing on my own, sounding amazing. Soon we had gone to perform in front of our class to OTHER classes, and now we had experienced performing in front of a large audience. Now we were prepared. 

 

The day of the presentation my heart was pounding almost out of my chest. I walked up to the stage nice and quickly, and of course my mom and grandma were front and center. I spoke into the mic in a nic clear voice, so everyone could hear me. It was so hard to resist not looking back at the screen, but if I did it would bring so much attention towards me, and that was the last thing I wanted. Soon the weight was off my chest. We were finished! Now if anybody EVER asks me if I know how earthquakes are measured be prepared because I have a whole speech in this head.

 

Working in groups was difficult because they would always chat and sometimes I would get sucked into their nonsense. I’m usually a pretty serious, not crazy kid during the school hours but this group drove me so crazy I was sometimes the one starting the conversations. I was driving myself bananas. At one point we got it together when we knew it was getting serious, and we would be performing soon. We had also realized that you can have fun while also talking to one another so that made it A LOT easier to rehearse and get things right. 

A fun thing about working in a group was that If I was having a bad day they could always cheer me up, for instance when I heard “Go rehearse!” I knew my day had already gotten so much better. They could always get me to have a little fun, or take a little risk, and usually I’m not a big risk taker, but the one thing that I am most proud of was how much I grew during this project. Not just physically but mentally also. They taught me that sometimes in life it’s okay for something not to be perfect, and that it’s okay to take risks and sometimes fail too. I loved this project and I would love to do it again in the near future.

Partner Book Club Reflection

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My favorite part about being in a book club partnership was sharing ideas because I really got to express how I felt about the book and sometimes if I was just writing in a notebook it didn’t feel the same as talking to a real person face to face.
The most challenging part was staying focussed because we could be talking about Matilda one minute and then the next we could be talking about Harry Potter, or if we were saying our jots after we are done we could just trail off of our book and start talking about something else.
My favorite book that we read was Matilda because it kept us interested with lots of surprises and was really funny and I thought it was really cute. My least favorite book was Penguin Days because it was really boring (it was one of those books that went like: Sally hurt her leg but the next day it was better, the end) and there were no exciting plot twists like there were in Matilda.
For my jots I think I can work on writing more and to explain and elaborate like if I was trying to prove that Sally is mean I would have to give more evidence than just say: Sally called Sara mean names. I think I could also work on trying new jots instead of just doing character traits, character traits, character traits, and character traits over and over again.
I think the most important part of working with a partner is not to get distracted because you will never really understand the book unless you talk about it and if you don’t you won’t understand it as well as if you did talk about it, like if I was just staring off into the distance I wouldn’t be thinking deeply about my book and would never really deeply understand why she did this or why he did that.
I learned during working with a partner that I like the author Roald Dahl and that I like how creative he is with the stories and how he really makes it feel like the characters are coming alive, or like I really know Matilda Wormwood. I really liked working with a reading partner and I hope I do it again.

Expert Book: Heathcote Traditions

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To come up with my idea I first listed a bunch of hobbies, sports, things I’ve studied before and collections I have. Then I picked the one I knew about best. I picked Heathcote traditions. I picked Heathcote traditions because I go to Heathcote Elementary school and I love it and all of its traditions. I have been in Heathcote for about four years so I knew a lot about it and all of it’s yearly traditions

I felt that editing was a bit difficult for me because whenever I thought I was done I always had to go back and edit somehow and change things. For instance, one time I thought I was completely done but I had to go back and edit my glossary, I had to link it, I had to make my colons dashes because my table of contents had dashes and I had to keep it consistent.

The part I needed the most help with was reading it over and checking it because sometimes when I’ve been staring at one piece of writing for a long time if there is something wrong I probably won’t notice it when or if I look over it, if there was a period missing I wouldn’t notice it at all and if nobody checked it I would end up publishing it with a bunch of mistakes.

My favorite part of making my expert book was searching for pictures because I got to get really creative with which pictures I could use and what captions to put with them. I got to edit the size and what I wanted to write inside the caption that would match which was really creative and fun for me.

I learned during this process that nothing is ever perfect. Nothing that I was writing would ever be perfect but that’s a good thing because nobody is perfect so I started to realize not to try to make everything perfect because it never will be and I’m trying my best and nothing will change that.

I learned that I like editing with google slides on the computer because I liked getting faster and better at typing, and I liked seeing what I wrote in my writer’s notebook come to life with pictures and everything on the big screen which was really cool and made it exciting for me.

I feel that my final project turned out amazing because looking back at what I wrote in my writer’s notebook and then looking at what it turned out to be was a pretty big difference and I worked really hard to make it as amazing as it is and I’m really proud of that.

This is my expert book.


Thank you for reading!

Maglev Reflection

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Our original train had 2 strip magnets on the edge, two disc magnets on the other edges and one donut magnet in the middle. Also for the train and track the were both facing north. For the original track there were 3 strip magnets, one in the middle one on the right and one on the left. Our first design did not work because the magnets attracted to the sides and it was not balanced. For the train we took out the donut magnet and both the disc magnets and just kept the 2 strip magnets. On the track we put on two more strip magnets to make it five.

 

For the final track we had 2 strip magnets along the edges with 2 stacked on each side and they were both facing north and had tape over the sides so that it would not attract to the side like it did before. The final train had 2 strip magnets going along the edges too, so that it was balanced and they were also covered in tape just like the track. I thought the train was successful because it was balanced with the track and it was not attracted to the sides and they were both north and north so it repelled. I thought during the creating stage it was really frustrating when it didn’t work and then we had to make a new plan. Working with a group was fun but it was very challenging. Sometimes my group didn’t listen to me or my ideas and it was very frustrating but it was also fun combining ideas.

 

Personal Narrative Reflection

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What I am most proud of about my narrative is my ending because I was able to add in an equal amount of thought/feeling and dialogue and I left the reader feeling something. For example, when I said “Cookies really do taste better with a little bit of love,” I think it would make the reader say “Aww,” I also really like how I stretched out my beginning and put tons of detail. For example, when I wrote, “I sprinted over to the staircase and looked up, nobody was coming down so I ran over to the fridge and plopped the dough on the table, by the time I did my mom was already halfway down the stairs.”

I thought paragraphing was hard for me because I struggled finding places when it was a change of setting or speaker but I think I have been improving bit by bit. Putting a balanced amount of dialogue and thought/feeling was a bit hard for me because I didn’t know if I should put dialogue in or thought/feeling in some places, but I am definitely improving. 

Cookie Drama

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Beep! Beep! Beep! “Mom the timer is going off!” I called. I sprinted over to the staircase and looked up. Nobody was coming down so instead of waiting I ran over to the fridge, got the dough out and plopped it on the table. As soon as I did my mom was already halfway down the stairs. 

“What shapes do you want, sweetie?” my mom asked “A rainbow,” she suggested.

“Yeah definitely,” I replied. This was going to be the best night ever! I thought.

My mom took out a rainbow cookie cutter, a heart cookie cutter, and last but not least a unicorn cookie cutter. I was jumping up and down excitedly. My mom took out a light brown rolling pin and placed it on the table while she hurried over to the cabinet to get parchment paper.

I wonder what’s taking so long? I thought.

When everything was finally set up I grabbed the rolling pin off the table and began to roll the dough.

“Great sweetie!” my mom said cheerfully.

The wind was howling outside. I gently placed the cookie cutter on top of the dough and softly pressed down.

“This is fun!” I told my mom. At least I thought it was until I heard footsteps and they were heading towards me.

“JAKE?” I yelled as he approached the kitchen. “ What do you want?” I said angrily.

 “Can I bake too?” he asked politely.

“Of course you can sweetie,” my mom responded.

My hands made a fist. Whenever Jake was baking with mom he would never include me, so why should I include him? I screamed at the top of my lungs, 

“That’s not fair!” I stormed out of the room with smoke coming out of my ears.

I curled up into a ball in the corner of the mudroom with my arms crossed, my mom following me.

“Honey, just try baking with him for a little,” my mom said.

“Fine,” I replied. I stomped back into the room with a frown plastered across my face. I ran over to the dough so Jake wouldn’t get any turns.

“Lucy, let Jake have a turn,” my mom muttered to me.

“Ok,” I moaned.

“Do you want me to get more cookie cutters?” Jake asked.

“Sure,” I responded wondering where he would get more cookie cutters. “Woah!” I exclaimed when Jake placed a metal basket filled to the tippy top with all sorts of cookie cutters like flowers and shapes and a mini elephant ( the elephant was so cute).

When I thought about it I was having an even better time than I would have had without him.

“This is a lot of fun, thanks mom,” I said

“I knew it would work,” she responded.

After the cookies were baked and Jake and I were frosting them I squeezed Jake tightly.

“Jake,” I said

“Yeah,” he responded

“ I’m so,  so, so sorry I was mean to you and I love you so much,”

“That’s sweet, I love you too but stop hugging me you’re messing up my cookie,” he said.

He could never let the moment last could he, I thought with a chuckle. I took a big bite out of one of my cookies and said,

“Cookies really do taste better with a little bit of love.”