Goals

For this term’s SLC, I am to come up with three goals, a goal specific to humanities, a goal specific to science, and a goal towards to my personal learning growth. These goals are to be measurable and attainable.

1. My goal for humanities this term is to be able to write efficiently and eloquently without losing tone or meaning. I think being able to write with a larger vocabulary, and faster without second guessing myself, would benefit my work greatly.

2. My goal for science this term is to do my work throughly and try to obtain a deeper understanding of my science subjects.

3. My goal for personal learning this term is procrastinate less and get more work done (or more drafts) so my final product will have more revisions and ultimately be better.

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Humanities Reflection

This year in humanities I have been working on multiple projects and assignments that I could showcase here. I have chosen to show my writing in essays, journals, and — to show my work from this past term. Our class has written two essays since December, one on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and one on John Krakauer’s novel Into Thin Air. Below are my essays from both of these assignments.

I personally think my writing is better in my Into Thin Air essay. It is probably because I spent more time and effort on that essay. These essay assignments have given me the tools to build up essays in the future. I have learned how to properly use quotes, and how to write about a topic objectively. I hope to learn how to write these kinds of essays better in the future, and want to work on that in this coming term. I especially want to work on making my sentences elegant, yet still have a themed and constant flow to it.

Procrastination comes into play everywhere I go, and this is no exception. I am hopeful to abolish this habit as we come in to 2015. I want to take my best foot forward this term, and do all my work before the due date. In humanities for the rest of the year, I plan to have all of my work done quality and ahead of time. My work is done best when a first draft is finished early, so I can go back and make edits and corrections. I want for my work to have a shown increase in quality (and maybe even quantity) in 2015.

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Science Reflection

In my science class this year, we have done many labs, projects, and worksheets. We have already studied an array of topics from Chemistry to DNA to Reproduction. I feel the quality of my work has fluctuated throughout the school year, depending on the time of year and the subject. I think my work has recently gotten better than it was at the beginning of the year. I would like to show you a project below I did for science earlier in the year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGifHVZzbnQ

I realize, looking back on this video, that it is not as good as I once thought it was. This video, which is on the genetic mutation Maple Syrup Urine Disease, has awkward wording, mumbling, and more. This doesn’t stop the fact that I am still proud of this video. The way I did this project shows my way of thinking. I evolved this project many times, from a skimpy script all the way to an explain everything to a video. I so feel that I have learned how to evolve my work well and forward, and the process of this assignment helped me with that. My one regret is putting the video together so quickly. I should have paced it so I could make improvements on the video, and not just the information.

Another instance of me not spacing out my work is my Cancer Project. I didn’t allow enough time for me to review and edit my final product, resulting in an end product that wasn’t to the best of my abilities. The writing in the project was lacking, and there were no pictures or voice over affects. Below is the Keynote I handed in for my final draft.

In the future I hope not to have something like that happen again. To make sure of that, I am working my hardest to make sure my work is done slowly and in advance. I realize that to do this, I need to take my time on my work.

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Creation Of a Teenage Lionwalker

My first inspiration for my Frankenstuffie was okay I need to find a way to use these stuffed animals into one. We had to sew at least 3 (or 4? I don’t remember) stuffed animals together, so I just used what I had lying around. I don’t have any pictures of me actually sewing the animal, but here’s what I ended up with:

When I was writing my first draft of my Frankenstuffie writing assignment, I can’t really say I was inspired. I got an idea, didn’t worry about how weird it really was, and rolled with it until I had 500 words. It was extremely rough, why don’t you just look for yourself at this excerpt from it.

Yeah…okay moving on from that.

When I looked at what I had written, I knew it wasn’t something I could hand in again (but it was kind of funny reading again). I took what I had, deleted most of it, and kept the bones. I used those tiny paragraphs I had kept to rebuild the story. I think I had about four or five drafts before I got to my final draft. I had to make drastic edits in my story to get to my final product, but I think what I have now is pretty good.

Kirby Harris
Lionwalker The Fake Pokemon

Many years ago, there lived a man in the interior of British Columbia, and there he lived happily with his wife and son. Out in the backyard of the mans home, there was a big oak tree, where a tire swing was hung. This oak tree was sad, because it could not run or play like the little boy it would see everyday. The tree was destined to be forever unsatisfied.
Five years later, the same man had gone slightly insane. After being laid off from his job, the man bought a new device called a Gameboy. Along with the Gameboy was a game called Pokemon. Pokemon became the man’s obsession, and was so insanely obsessed that he changed his name to Dr. Oak. Soon after this, his wife filled for divorce, calling him a “bad father” and a “crazy lunatic”, whatever that means.
The man’s obsession only got worse, and after some court-mandated therapy convinced him to find a goal, he found one. Dr. Oak would create a living Pokemon!
Days and nights, Dr. Oak worked. Finding the right genes from the right chromosomes, and making every bit match up, Dr. Oak became an expert in genetic mutations and modified organisms. He took the legs and tail of a lion, monkey ears for sharp hearing, a bear mouth for easy eating, and the body of a lion-fish to create his Lionwalker. Dr. Oak had become unstoppable.
Finally, when Dr. Oak was just about ready to start the scientific process, he thought up a great new idea, “what is my Lionwalker could use photosynthesis?”. Suddenly a whole new idea came into his head, and Dr. Oak quickly got together some DNA from the Oak Tree in his backyard. His project was delayed by three months as he worked on adding this special feature to his Pokemon.
Dr. Oak was just about done. Finally, all his hard work had payed off. He saw his Lionwalker come to life right before his eyes. Tears filled Dr. Oak’s eyes as he saw his creation begin to move around. He finally did something right, and this one wasn’t going to leave him.
Lionwalker became Dr. Oak’s companion, living happily in his company. Now, Dr. Oak is an elderly man, and his Lionwalker has become weak as well. Still, everyday they sit in the backyard, right with the big oak tree, who even though it still can’t move, is happy to see a part of itself running in the sun.

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Only Kind of Sleepless in Seattle

A couple of weeks ago, my whole FLIGHT 9 class went to Seattle, where did a whole lot of things. It’s kind of crazy how many things we did. Although, crazy was kind of the point of the trip. While we were there, in groups of three or four, we would explain why a certain thing was crazy in it’s own way, and finish it off with a video. Jolene, Griffin, and I got the topic Sustainability in Zoos, specifically the Woodland Park Zoo. Our first goal was to finish a storyboard before to we left, so this is what we came up with in the one block we had:

The zoo was the first place we went on our trip. We weren’t there for very long so we only got about 45 minutes to do our filming. With only 45 minutes, we had a hard time getting everything we wanted, and we didn’t really. We had to do some creative things with the footage we had, and although this wasn’t the video we had originally set out to make, I think it shows our efforts. The three of us worked hard back at school to get the video up to a standard we were proud of and I think the overall project reflects that.

On the actual sustainability, we had to show in our video what the Woodland Park Zoo does to make their zoo sustainable, and ‘green’. What we got was a list of programs that the zoo does, including the Green Team, the Zoo Doo project, and quite a few more. If you want to check out any of these programs you can watch our video down below. Or click here to go to the zoo’s website.

http://youtu.be/lQpwjDisDkg

This video is our final project. We worked hard for a couple of weeks to get this out, and had to broaden our iMovie skills to do it. I hope you enjoy our video.

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Lionwalker The Fake Pokémon

I learned that iMovie was a much more complex application than I had previously thought. Having only played around with the app before, I didn’t know it could be used for things like this.

http://youtu.be/vQhmLifQG-U

To integrate science, I threw in a few words about what we were learning about. I do though realize that I could have integrated more than I did into the iMovie.
To integrate the Industrial Revolution, I made my story to be about somebody inventing something to solve an issue in their life. I feel that in the Industrial Revolution, a lot of things that made a huge impact were invented that way.
If I could do this project over again, I would probably spend a bit more time on the filming and music to make the overall effect of the movie better, and not rely as much on voice over.

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