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Aloha! On this bright and beautiful day we’ll be covering something that I’ve been doing for a few years called Blue Sky! You can check out my winter exhibition I did in the winter here or last summer’s exhibition here. For this summer’s exhibition we had to choose a problem that impacted either babies, toddlers, pets, seniors, or Tweens. We had to turn this problem into an inquiry question beginning with “How might we…” At first it was very hard to find a problem and I was stuck. I knew that I wanted my blue sky to be centred around pets because my mom is a vet and I love animals a lot. I also wanted to play with my cat, Tripod. With that in mind, I went to my mom and asked her about a problem that she has with cats. She explained that there are a lot of cats that aren’t as active as they should be and that maybe I could create a cat playhouse that would help with that issue. She suggested an idea where the cat’s food or treats would drop from one side and the cat would have to run to that side to retrieve it. It would then drop another from the other side and the cat would need to run to the other side to eat it. I did a lot of research about cats and what diseases they can have by being overweight such as But as I explained in my tPOL post, started on the actual building of this was very difficult for me. So then one day my mom had a meeting with a behaviouralist who talked all about cat’s behaviour and toys people can buy where the cat would need to work for their food. 
What I thought of doing was making cost-effective ways for people to help their cat get more exercise at home. Home, being a smaller living space such as an apartment, condo, townhouse, etc. Where the cat won’t have enough roaming space. I began by researching toys that I could bring into the cat playhouse, like this toilet paper roll toy, or this cardboard mouse. I also brought in some toys made of pipe cleaners and feathers. I used a baby’s crib as the structure of the playhouse and it worked really well because it has some transparent walls. Here’s a picture of my cat playing in the experimental crib: 

I just so happened to make a video of Tripod playing with the toys which I had on next to my poster board. Here it is!
At the moment I’m unable to insert my video.
This project was a great learning experience and I loved how it turned out. See you in the next post!

We’ve been learning so much in health & career lately that I’m surprised our brains haven’t exploded, much like Ruby‘s appendix. The more recent project is the Things I Carry one. For this one, we needed to put together a Keynote presentation that includes:  * at least one image where we adjusted the mask

        * at least one image that we adjusted the size of

        * At least one image that we used insta alpha on

        * At least one magic move

        * at least one object grouping

        * at least one added animation

        * at least one added transition

        * at least one object build

        * presenter notes
We also needed to include at least ten things we carry, both mental and physical. The things I included in my presentation are: 
– my optimism

– my creativity 

– my friendliness

– goal setting

– diving

– my perseverance 

– my pets

– my exitableness/enthusiasm 

– my parents

– my siblings 

– my bus pas
At the moment I’m unable to show you my keynote.
One of the things I carry would be my optimism which is so helpful because it promotes happiness, self respect and integrity. I use it to cheer up others and I find that I have fun doing almost anything. 

Next up I have my creativity which is very beneficial, especially in school. It helps my ideas to be original and interesting.
Being outgoing helps me a lot in many cases. Being around friends makes me happy and encourages me to go out and make lasting memories with them.
I often find myself procrastinating and goal setting helps teach me to be more disciplined and motivated to get something done. I use it a lot diving when learning new things and when I’m feeling overwhelmed with schoolwork. 
Diving keeps me moving and physically fit. Being active helps me to be awake and I’m more attentive at school. This is especially important nowadays with people in their devices so much, I pride myself on staying active.
Perseverance is especially important when I do fourteen hours plus of diving and it can be very tempting sometimes to just give up. Without my perseverance, I likely would’ve quit diving a long time ago along with other commitments.
My cat brings me lots of comfort and support. My old dog, Morgan was really close to me and was a great source of love. 
My ability to get excited over just about anything helps spread happiness to others.It helps me to look forward to little things and have positive thoughts.
My parents are very supportive with my extracurricular activities, driving me all the way to West Van or downtown Vancouver for diving. They help me with homework and my organization, helping me to stay up to date on assignments. 
I spend a lot of time with my siblings and they’re always with me whether it be my thoughts or the pictures of them my mom snuck in my bag.  
My bus pass symbolizes my independence and it helps get me place-to-place. Just like my independence will take me places in life. 

All in all, I had a lot of fun doing this project and I found that it helped me to appreciate what I have a little more.

See you in the next post!

How it began: people learned about the internet and saw what you could do on it. They started uploading videos and making websites. More people joined because they felt restless and held down by unacceptable restrictions in society, religion, the economy or the government. (Crane Brinton’s causes of a revolution) They figured out that back then you could put a lot of stuff out there on the internet and not many people would see it or get offended so they started posting more and more and creating more stuff. Gradually, the internet became bigger and now it is so huge that it has solved police cases and made people famous. Reading about what Crane Brinton has said about the causes, conditions, and stages of a revolution i wouldn’t think that it fits into what he has said. I feel like this kind of revolution would need a different kind of explanation, one that might exclude violence. But there are definitely smaller revolutions within the internet that might fit into his context. Here’s a small drawing representing how i thought Crane Brinton’s theory could relate to the internet.

No puns for today:(

 

Well, this summer was definitely… interesting. It was filled with all different kinds of microwaved burritos and quality family time together. *eye twitch* I’m currently coming home from my latest and greatest family adventure to Kelowna. We were visiting my nonna and nonno (it’s Italian I know I’m exquisito) and unfortunately they don’t have wifi. *cries a river* My cousin normally comes to visit as well but she couldn’t so I had A LOT of time on my hands. Four days, to be exact. My birthday had just passed and my other cousin lent me 6 books and found the two in bookshelf she gave me for xmas that I still haven’t read so I also brought those to Kelowna. I ended up bringing ten books because I still haven’t read The Fate of Ten (lol I should get an award for procrastinating this much) and also a horror book that I’m too wuss to read but I thought I might be in the mood for horror/thriller. I wasn’t. It did turn out that I didn’t actually have that much free time but I still managed to finish seven out of the ten books I brought. Seven in four days! Wooooo!! We had some great Italian food and I learned how to shove forkfuls and forkfuls of pasta down my gutter. It’s a really great and useful skill to have. Driving back from Kelowna isn’t the greatest because we’ve found at least 10 ants and they just so happened to all be crawling on me. Hurray. Other than that not much happened in Kelowna and I really enjoyed doing activities with my family.

 This summer I did a lot of diving and I went to provincials. It was held in Coquitlam and I had a lot of fun. In summary, this summer was delicious.

SLC
My best evidence of learning this yer that I’m most proud of would be my Renaissance poster. It might not seem like much, but the amount of research, time, and effort I put into it was outstanding. I tried really hard to add detail and draw the pictures clear so people could understand it. In the beginning of this project, I wasn’t so sure about what I would do and how I could make it but while I was researching I came up with a layout of where I could draw out all my ideas and what style I should draw the pictures in. Even if I had my idea, I was still unsure of how this would turnout. I didn’t think I could pull this project off and make it within the timeline I was given so I worked even harder to make sure that when people look at what I drew on the poster they’d understand what I was trying to show and what I was trying to represent.

Before we started the poster, we had to research 3 different people from the Renaissance. We researched a thinker, artist, and scientist. My thinker was Pietro Summonte, my artist was Gentile Bellini, and my scientist was Jean Baptiste Deneys. For this assignment, we were told to make a triple Venn diagram about these 3 people comparing what they had in common during their life, their beliefs, traditions, etc.

Using the information from the Venn diagram we had to make a poster comparing today to the Renaissance. In my poster, I compared gender equality and I showed that in the Renaissance women were inferior to men because all three of the famous people I was researching were all male. The next thing I showed in my poster was that all of my people worked for a group. For example, Gentile Bellini was the official portrait artist for the Doges of Venice. Jean Baptiste was the official physician of King Louis XIV. I think that it means that politics were a lot different back then and that people might not have had as much freedom as we do today.

I made two drafts of the poster and in the first one, one of the major improvements was that I had an Italian flag and a flag from France drawn because all of my people I was researching were from either one of those places. The flags didn’t represent or show what I was trying to get across to the people looking at my poster. As I was researching and looking for a new idea, I found that everyone had a job within the community that they helped out with so I decided to change the flags in that comparison.

My best evidence of work that could’ve been improved was from the iBook, the Sikhism Explain Everything. Doing this project was very challenging to me because I I found the app Explain Everything very hard to use because I didn’t understand it even when I spent so much time playing around with it and creating new things with it. I got very frustrated when using the app. It took me very long to make the EE and it really didn’t help when I was having challenges and feeling frustrated. However, I do think that my group pulled together at the end and so did my sikhism Explain Everything. Working in groups to make the EEs was very helpful because I could ask any group member to help me understand the app and how to use it. I do think I could’ve worked harder to improve the EE and add more animation and pictures. I also think I could’ve edited the script just a little bit more to make it fit better with the Explain Everything.

When I look back to the beginning of the year, I see that I’ve developed a lot in writing, art, and so much more. I’ve been given great learning opportunities like going fencing, visiting religious temples, mosques, and churches. I’ve learned how to research and how to get information off the internet which I wasn’t familiar to in the beginning of the year. I learned how to use so many new apps and I learned that hard work and effort will pay off when making something. I learned new ways of organization and I really enjoyed this year. Thank you!

A little while ago our class had to make an Explain Everything based on our worldview. We made 2 drafts for this project that had to include lots of the app’s features such as audio, pictures, text, video, and animation. Our Explain Everything needed to show that we had an understanding of worldview and it needed to have clear, interesting examples to help portray our personal worldview with deep thought. This was my first time ever using Explain Everything and I’ve got to admit, it was challenging but it was very good practice before we started our group religion projects. My teachers wanted us to use at least two other apps so I used Paper 53 to make my title page and Snapseed to edit my pictures. It was very tricky learning to use this app but I (somewhat) managed. Here’s my second draft of my Worldview Explain Everything: https://youtu.be/EqJTuQ4brZk

I should really stop these sewing jokes, I’m running out of material.

Recently, my class has been working towards making and designing our very own quilt squares. We were split up into groups of four or five people to make our quilts. In my group, we decided to use an abstract style to represent our assigned parts of our heroes’ journey. My quilt represents the end of our heroes’ journey. In the end of our story, the people who were saved by Juno built a statue of him in honour of his bravery. The islanders also named the island after Juno and over time built a big and healthy civilization on the island.
I designed my quilt to look like a brick wall to signify how the civilization supports itself and how it used that support to get bigger and better over time. I coloured the top and bottom layers of bricks gray to represent the cities, the pavement, and roads. Near the middle of my quilt square I coloured it black and red to represent the memory of both Juno’s death and bravery. I coloured the brick layer in the middle gold to represent the statue that the people built of Juno in honour of his strength. In the final brick layer which is just above the golden layer is a layer of green and blue used to represent the good people of Juno’s island.

I found this project to be very enjoyable as well as a great learning opportunity for me to learn to sew. I look forward to more interesting projects.

Here’s a whole bunch of links from my group for the other parts of Juno’s journey:

Part 1: Calum’s Part: http://www.blog44.ca/calumo/

One day there was a young man named Juno, he didn’t have very many friends or family, although, everybody knew him. His mother had died when he was young, and his father abandoned him, so he was very lonely. Every morning he would get up and do the same thing over and over again, but this day was different, because as he was sipping his morning cup of coffee he heard cries for help just outside his house. He courageously ran out and saw people running and heard and saw gun fire.

Part 2: Mimi’s Part: http://www.blog44.ca/mimiz/

He grabbed as many people as he could and ran to the nearby forest they ran for miles until everybody was out of breath by now it was getting dark and everybody was getting very tired so they decided to go to sleep. The next day everybody decided that they would go around the coast instead of back through the village, everybody thought that was the safest way. They walked for days on end and many people were very wounded, so they slowly died as they were walking. Finally they got to the village after surviving off of berries and water from the streams, everybody was famished so they ran to the nearest shop but something was wrong, nobody was out on the streets.

Part 3: Quinn’s Part: http://www.blog44.ca/quinnh/

Quinn’s part: Finally they got to the village after surviving off of berries and water from the streams everybody was famished so they ran to the nearest shop but something was wrong, nobody was out on the streets. they then decided to take a boat off to another island (which was their original plan) as they were leaving the dock they heard cries for help Juno jumped out of the boat and pointed the lady to the direction of the boat and just as she got in there was a person with a gun shooting at the boat so they quickly steered away nobody was hurt until they realized Juno was bleeding.

 

 

Part 4: Aiden’s Part: http://www.blog44.ca/aidens/

After boating for a few days Juno begun to slowly become weaker from the infected wound and eventually died.

Hello, and welcome back to my blog! Today I’ll be telling you a little about my quilt for a group project we started not too long ago. The most sewing I’ve ever done is probably helping my mom sew ripped sweaters and what not which made this project a great learning opportunity!
Within my group, I was assigned the job to design and make an abstract quilt to represent the ending of our heroes ‘ journey. The four other group members had to design and make an abstract quilt that represents a different part of the story that they chose.
A few difficulties I had during the quilting process included quilting on the blank side after I’ve flipped the quilt over because I had no guide to where I was supposed to sew.
I think this group project was a great learning experience for me because I got to learn how to sew and quilt.

A little while ago, my class did a unit on advertising. We were assigned a project where we had to make three advertisements. One of them was a business ad which we made an ad for a business. The second one was our advocacy ad which was an ad to help out the environment. The third was a natural landscape ad where we had to make an ad which would convince people to visit a scenery. By using multiple apps to ad text, edit our pictures, and make the layout of our ads we were able to complete all three of our advertisements.

Editing
When editing the pictures I changed the brightness, cropped the pictures, added filters, and I enhanced the pictures to brighten them and adjust the contact levels. When editing the poster, I changed the font of the text, the size of the text, and I tested different layouts to see which one would fit the image I had of my ad in my head. The apps I used to make and edit my ads and pictures include Snapseed by Google, Canva by Canva, Repix by Sumoing Ltd, Polarr Photo Editor by Polarr Inc, and Phoster by Bucket Labs, Comic Life 3 by Plasq LLC, and Photo Editor- by Axiem Systems.

Critique
While doing our ads we would improve it ourselves, but we would also get a lot of helpful and kind critique from our peers. I liked having the opportunity to get critique from others because I could get to know the style of ads they liked and I liked knowing their opinions on my choice of colour, font, text, and layout.

Changes
If I were to do anything differently next time it would be to get much more critique from my peers. I feel that with just some more critique from different people could help a lot with my ads and not only would I be satisfied with my advertisements, but others could definitely like them too.