When Mrs. Volpi and Ms. Heffernan first explained this project to us, I thought I would never be able to do it. But after they told me more about it, I became more excited than nervous and I wanted to try and pull this big project off! What we had to do was: research our topic (mine was floods), come up with a question that related to this topic, write it in these script boxes, and memorize! The unit in reading was called “Reading The Weather, Reading The World.” There were seven slides in each slide show and they were up on the screen. The slides would auto-advance every fifteen seconds, not giving us a lot of time to say all of our information.
Paraphrasing and memorizing were probably the hardest parts of the entire process for me. Every time we rehearsed in front of the class, I felt butterflies in my stomach, but when I started talking, all of the words I had memorized just flowed into my head. The hardest time when we rehearsed was when another class watched us rehearse. But when we did, I kind of got the feeling of when we were going to perform in front of the parents. Something that I enjoyed was looking through articles and books on websites like Kiddle and Epic. The books were full of information and they really helped me out when we were researching.
Overall, the whole thing was exciting and nerve-wrecking at the same time. I felt so happy when we were finished with the ignites, like i could just delete everything that had to do with it, and forget about my entire script. But, we have to do ignites and capstone next year so at least I have some experience now! I realize now, that I didn’t really have anything to worry about at the beginning, because no one really noticed my mistakes. In fact, Mr. Casal told the whole class something that I’ll never forget. He told us: ” no one will know if you made a mistake, becasue you’re the only one who know your script.” When he told us that, a little bit of my nervousness went away and I actually was told that I did pretty good!
I chose Somalia to research and study because when I knew that so many people were doing Ethiopia (my first choice), I wanted to do something different. Something of my own! And so I chose Somalia to learn about, and to be honest I’m really glad I did. It was a great country to do a infographic on and I enjoyed the experience. At first, I wasn’t too excited about it, but as I kept finding really cool facts, I began to love it more and more! Over all, I’m really glad I did Somalia and I enjoyed creating my Infographic!