How do people and the environment affect each other?

From the work we did, I found that the environment helps us so much by giving us food, water, shelter and clean air, but we just trash it and blame all the bad things on NASA, scientists, the government and politicians. But most often people just don’t know that what they’re doing is bad for the environment. If we start taking better action now we are going to have a better word in the future.

Evidence of my learning

Stepping stone 

In one stepping stone we had to review videos on how multiple people helped the environment. This taught me about many ways to help the environment and how many people do it. One video dealt with people planting trees. I saw that people can make a difference. It made me wonder how I could make a difference to the environment.

Milestone

In the CommonLit learnings, some of the stories showed how much danger we are in if we don’t take action on climate change. I really liked Quiet Town because it went more into depth about what could happen to one particular family. I learned about writing persuasively through foreshadowing and showing impact. 

Project

For my project, I wrote a letter to Terry Beech about how we could positively affect how many electric cars were sold. I showed through evidence how this could help the environment and I gave some action ideas. 

I can analyze how texts use literary devices to enhance both meaning and impact

One of the stories we read in CommonLit was Quiet Town. It used the literary device of foreshadowing. It shows what will happen if we don’t take enough action towards climate change. The way the story showed this is by taking time to show how much danger everyone is in. The foreshadowing built a lot of tension in the story which kept me interested on what was going to happen next.

I can use writing and design processes to plan, develop, and create original, engaging, and meaningful texts for a variety of purposes and audiences

In my letter, I used the learnings to introduce evidence about how electric cars are better than gas cars. That was easier after the learnings because the milestones and stepping stones taught me how to create a paragraph better than I knew before. I think my letter was persuasive and I hope Terry Beech is going to take action.

I can reflect, assess, and refine texts to improve clarity, effectiveness, and impact for purpose, audience, and message

I found when I was making my letter I saw that the more revisions I did, the better it got. Also, over time after working on it a lot I could see how much better it got because it started with an extremely rough idea and draft and it turned into a fairly good letter. What really helped was the conference, the stories that I read in common lit and also all the stepping stones that we did.

Overall I think that this project was really fun and I like that it taught me a lot about how to make multi paragraph letters and how to properly convey a persuasive idea to a person of power.

For this recent project my team made a game based on chutes and ladders. I worked with Luca and Zach. The competencies that we used to make the game were:

Reasoning and analyzing

Our game explored logic and patterns and the exponent laws. We analyzed what types of games people like that can have math in them. I think I learned more about exponents by creating the questions in the game.

Communicating and representing

We had to think of a fun way to work with the expressions and present math in a concrete form. We did that by making a board and pieces and setting out clear rules to follow so people could play with exponents in the game. We refined the game board multiple times to make the game better and more interesting.

Applying and innovating

By making the game, I found how exponents could be used in many different ways. The team collaborated well. We shared tasks like thinking of the game structure, making the game board and pieces.

Overall I still don’t love exponents, but the game turned out fun and we worked well together