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.