Tag Archives: TED Talk

First Week of 5th Grade

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“PHEWWWW!” You only have 3 more minutes left of the challenge and your entire tower just collapsed, you have to keep going. “We got this, just keep building!” One of your groupmates yells. Time passes and your tower looks like the tallest in the room until, “WOOSH!” The entire tower collapses, again! “30…29-” Your teacher chants. “It doesn’t matter if we win or not, just at least put in the effort.” You say confidently. We keep folding cards and building it higher, and higher, and higher. You place index cards on top of intex cards until the time runs out. “10…9…8…7…-” The class chants as you rush to complete your tower. “BEEP!” The time is up. Your teacher begins to walk around with a measuring stick and the intensity in the room builds. “13 inches!” Our teacher says starting with the tower to the right of us. Our team glances at each other with looks that say, “There is no way we could have beaten that,” so I respond with a look that says, “It’s okay,” When your teacher finally comes around, it’s your turn. My whole group tenses up waiting patiently for the big news. If you are interested in how tall our tower was, keep reading my blog post for more information on The Index Card Challenge and much more. This blog post features what I enjoyed during the first week of fifth grade and what I look forward to this school year. 

The two things that I enjoyed during the first week of school was the Index Card Challenge and watching the TEDTalk video, “Danger of a Single Story.” First off, The Index Card Challenge is a game where you work in a group and use 100 index cards to build the tallest structure possible in 15 minutes. I really enjoyed this challenge because it helped me envision how working in groups and partnerships will look for the rest of the year. It helped me reacquaint myself with my peers after summer break and not only did I socialize with my table but I got back into the feel of school and working together. For example, my group was struggling at the end, but we still kept going even though we knew we wouldn’t win. Our tower turned out to be 9 inches tall, we lost but we still had fun during the process. Something else I enjoyed was watching the TEDTalk video, “Danger of a Single Story.”. This story written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was an 18 minute life changing story. It was about Ms. Adichie and how when she moved to the states for college how everybody assumed she didn’t speak English and that she didn’t have basic life skills, like using a stove, just because she was from Africa. This is called the danger of a single story, like when someone points out only the poor parts of Africa and then everybody assumes Africa is a poor continent even though there are cities and places there, like where we live. This really inspired me and I never even realized that there were people that just assumed that. Some people even think of Africa as a country even though it is a diverse continent with many different countries inside of it. It wasn’t just Africa, people also made assumptions about Mexicans and countless other countries and continents. This helped me realize that you can’t just assume or summarize something about a place or a group of people.

This year I am looking forward to Capstone and Hot dog Field Day. To start off I am looking forward to Capstone for multiple reasons. One of them being the fact that I get to study my favorite topic and present a slideshow about it. I have been waiting for 6 years to do capstone after my oldest brother had it when he was in 5th grade (2019). Both of my brothers set the bar pretty high, so I hope I can reach their standards. After thinking about Capstone since my oldest brother did it I have come to the conclusion to make it about the Evolution of Women’s Fashion and How the Rest of The World has had an Impact on it. I can’t wait to do research on one of the things I am most passionate about. I am excited to share my information with my parents and the rest of the grade. I hope my slideshow really makes an impact on my viewers and also teaches me new things. Moving onto Hot dog Field Day, Field day is one of the only days of the year that all of the kids get to go outside and play field games the entire day. In this event there are various games such as tug of war, capture the flag, and gaga. All of the kids in each class dress in a specific school colors and compete to figure out the winning class. It’s specifically called Hot dog field day because for lunch, some class parents volunteer to make hot dogs for lunch. I am excited forHot dog field day specifically because it’s on one of the last days of school and it’s a tradition for only the fifth grade. I know just because I will be competing against my friends all day doesn’t mean that I still won’t have a fun day and get to have fun with them. It’s just a friendly competition so even if I lose I will still be happy that I got to experience it. Overall it seems like a fun day and I look forward to doing it.

In conclusion, I have enjoyed everything we have done for the past first week of school and there are many things I look forward to this year. I know fifth grade is going to be a blast and I anticipate this to be my favorite year out of all my years at Heathcote. How about you? What is your favorite memory from fifth grade? 

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.