I have posted a couple of these before on my blog or learning portfolio as my teacher likes to call it now. But pretty much all we do is get shown a picture or short video and we have to write as much as we can in a couple with that image or video as our inspiration. In this one the photo was of the point of view as a very small animal in a small grassy area. So after seeing that this is what I made.

Andy was a curios one. He was always wondering what else there was in his city to discover. Because he was so small he couldn’t travel far distances without returning to his home with all his brothers and sisters. Being an ant was fun most of the time. You could get away with things bigger creatures couldn’t. For example sneaking into picnic baskets to steal tiny crumbs of food from the masters. The masters are called the masters because they are the ones that rule everything, as al the other animals in the city know. The city was actually a forest but because it has so much life in it the ants did not know what else to call it. The masters have been coming farther and farther in the city lately and were disturbing all the creatures in there. The rumour was that the maters were planning something big. That they were going to destroy the city. Of course one could argue saying that it was just a rumour and that nothing would actually happen but the rumour, as all rumours do, had a source. That source came from the masters creature. A strange bouncy animal with to much energy that always comes in the city with the masters. It told the head of the city, who was an owl that the masters were bringing in huge, loud and dangerous creatures that were destroying the outer reaches of the city. Most of the creatures did not know this as they mostly stay on their part but this news travels quickly. The story had turned into an outrageous lie now and everyone was worried. Not Andy though he stayed as calm as ever going about daily life dreaming of bigger things. He did his part round the house helping out his mom with all his brothers and sisters forever expanding his great colony. But little did he know that it would not stay like this for much longer. As the masters kept moving into the city destroying everything in sight.

One assignment we had in class was to read an article written by a man called Jesse Prinz. In this article he talked about everything to do with wonder and what he thought about it. I’ll link it here if you want to read it, it’d really quite interesting. After we read the article our teacher gave us four questions to answer about the article. Here are my responses.

Questions

Responses

1.Prinz was a very young boy when he saw the circus, when you are a child like that your mind tends to wonder about a lot more magical things than if you were an adult. As it says in the article when your are an adult you wonder about things that are more material than the nonexistent things that children can wonder about. For example children wonder about magical creatures and weather you will be able to fly or not whereas adults would wonder about history and wars.

2. The three bodily symptoms Prinz talks about are sensory, cognitive, and spiritual.

Sensory: “wondrous things engage our senses”. If we couldn’t see the thing that was happening in our mind than there would be no such thing as wonder.
Cognitive: suspension of breath, sacred, startled. This could happen when you’re reading a good book and you can’t wait to see what happens next.
Spiritual: “we look upwards in veneration”. Prinz talks about wonder as if it was a higher being than people.

3.Francis Bacon believed that wonder “broken knowledge” was something that science couldn’t cure.

4. When I was younger and I first started watching soccer with my dad I wondered what it would be like to play on such a massive space and run and score amazing goals with my team. I used to imagine the huge amount of noise that the thousands of fans would make. I imagined looking all around the field at the players on both teams trying to find a place to put the ball. I would imagine my feet pounding on the ground trying to chase down the ball wrestling with other players to get it first. I would taste the sweat in my mouth as I run my hardest and the grass on the ground as I get tackled for the ball. I would imagine the smell of other players and the grass on the ground making run more and fight for everything. It would be like a whole other war on the field of the pitch. Especially when your playing for your country you fight for everything the ball, your team and to win the match it might as well be another world war. Just a lot less violent.

The last thing we did was a pretty basic assignment. All we had to do was create a mind map of words that came to mind when we thought of wonder. This the mind map that my group created.

I had a good time writing these and this whole new unit of wonder has me reallly intrigued. I cannot wait to continue it.