A few months ago we started a project called U.S. Regions. The class would be paired into groups and would be assigned a region from the U.S to research. My group got the Mid Atlantic region. I got paired with Chloe k, Rhyse, and Kate. We researched the states: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, and Washington d.c which is technically not considered a state.
My group decided to have each person research two states in the mid Atlantic region. Since we had 4 people and 7 states everyone got two states and two people had to share one. Chloe k did research on Maryland and New Jersey, Rhyse did research on Virginia and West Virginia, Kate did research on Washington d.c, I did research on Pennsylvania and Kate and I both did research on Delaware.
After researching, It was time to start building our presentation. My group all agreed we should do a slideshow. Making our slideshow was really fun because Ms.Edwards let us do whatever we wanted for our presentation so my group had a lot of fun with it. At first we didn’t really know what to do on our slideshow but before long we started getting some ideas. Our first version of our slideshow looked nothing like our final one because when we made the first version we suddenly had a completely new idea to make our slideshow into so we completely did it over. Our slideshow ended up looking really good and we all really liked it. We put really special touches on the slideshow which made it unique and helped it function and make it interesting. We did stuff like making stuff move when clicked on and linking the slides to other slides to easily go back and forth between slides.
Chloe K had a really good idea of making a Mid Atlantic jeopardy game at the end of our presentation to make it interesting and fun, we also thought that if people knew that there was going to be a jeopardy game at the end they would pay more attention to the presentation so they could win. I offered to make the jeopardy game and I did. Before making the jeopardy, we all finished our part of the presentation so then we could base the questions off of what we were teaching the class about our states. After we all did our slides in the slideshow about each of our states we saw what we were all teaching the class about our states and saw what categories they had in common so we could make the categories of the jeopardy game. Then I made the questions using the categories and the state slides and we were done.
We also had the idea of making a state themed wordle game for each state that everyone could play individually at the end of the day for independent menu.
Presenting the slideshow was really fun and we worked really hard on this project so we were really happy to see that the class enjoyed our presentation.
In my past blog post I have explained that my class is doing a project called capstone. For our capstone project we needed to find someone to interview. I thought that this was the easiest part of the project but a really fun and interesting one too.
Finding who to interview was fortunately really easy for me. Ms.Edwards and the other fifth grade teachers at heathcote gave out a letter to the parents explaining the whole capstone project, when my mom read it she asked me what my topic was and luckily for me I had an uncle who was a film producer, had his own company and knew a lot about CGI. My mom texted him to ask if I could interview him and I emailed two other experts and people that knew a lot about CGI just in case he couldn’t do it or didn’t want to and because we were instructed to contact at least 3 people. The two people I emailed didn’t respond but luckily my uncle Geronimo agreed to do the interview.
The interview went really well. I learned a lot of things that I couldn’t have found in websites, books or articles. Geronimo had really good answers to my questions that I think will really help me a lot with my research. He also helped me understand some parts of my research better, one part of my research mentioned something called a unreal engine and it said that it really helped revolutionize CGI in films which answers part of my main inquiry question but it didn’t really explain or say what the unreal engine was but Geronimo talked about it as part of his answer to a question and he really helped me understand what it was and helped me complete my notes by saying what it is and how it has revolutionized the film industry.
The interview really helped me a lot with my research and I can’t wait to put it all together in the next step of the capstone project process!
A few weeks ago Ms.Edwards told the class that we would be starting a capstone unit. The week that my class started capstone I was unfortunately sick and had the flu but luckily when I got back I was able to catch up. You might be wondering what a capstone is, and thats what im about to explain to you now, a capstone is a project that we do at heathcote towards the end of the year in fifth grade, basically we have to do a presentation about a topic that we get to choose, it’s a fun project but it can also be really challenging sometimes. We can choose what we want our topic to be and choose and plan out our presentation. I already have some ideas for my presentation even though we´re not up to that step yet, and even though we just started I can already tell this is going to be a fun project.
I think coming up with a topic is probably going to be the most challenging step of this project. To help us come up with a topic, my teacher made us fill out a document that had a bunch of questions about ourselves. I think it was really helpful because then I could see what I like and what could form a cool topic. I knew that I wanted my capstone topic to be movie making or something related and the topic I ended up choosing was CGI (computer generated imagery) which is the special effects used in movies. I wanted my topic to have to do something with movie making because movie making really interests me and because I’m an actress. I was originally going to just do movie making overall as my topic but it was too big of a topic so my teacher helped me narrow it down to CGI.
Coming up with my main inquiry question was also challenging and I had to change it a couple times to get the perfect one. Before I narrowed down my topic to CGI I was doing movie making in general as my topic. My first version of my question was ¨ how has movie making evolved overtime?¨ Then after fixing the wording a bit and playing around with it by adding to it I came up with ¨ How has newer technology changed the film industry and how has it helped movie making evolve overtime? ¨ I really liked this question and thought it was perfect until I met with my teacher to get it approved and she helped me narrow my topic down to CGI and change my question to ¨How has Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) revolutionized the film industry?¨ at first i liked the question but I wasn’t really sure if I was completely passionate about it because I really liked my old question, but when I started researching a bit about CGI I found some really cool information and ideas and that made me even more interested in the topic.
At first coming up with sub questions was a bit challenging because at first i thought my topic could just be researched without having to research anything else to figure it out but then I started thinking of the information I wanted to include in my capstone presentation and I started getting some ideas for sub questions like ¨How was CGI invented and used back when they made it?¨ and ¨ What is CGI and how does it work?¨
Overall I’m really excited for this unit because it will be really fun even though it has been a bit challenging. I can’t wait to make my capstone and see my classmates too!