Month: March 2021

Destination Imagination; In theory.

Have you heard of Destination Imagination?

Destination Imagination (or just DI) is an international competition that our school competes in. I am now going to direct you to the DI website because I think that they do a great job explaining what DI is all about. The Destination Imagination website is here. (I really suggest that you go to the website before reading further.)

I got the opportunity to be on one of the scientific challenge teams. The scientific challenge this year was called “In Theory”. You had to break or bend a scientific law using technical methods and create a documentary film about it. My group spent AGES trying to decide on a scientific law to bend. It was a tad bit stressful seeing as the scientific law is the most important part of out solution to the challenge. We ended up figuring out that we could bend the law of buoyancy by creating an electromagnet out of an iron bolt and some batteries. (Huge shoutout to my teammate Nolan for heading up the scientific part of this challenge!) Here is a video of the anti-buoyancy machine;

We also had to come up with a story that our documentary would follow. The story had to include a witness who sees and reacts to the law being bent/broken and an expert who has great knowledge of the scientific law itself. Again we had many ideas and a very hard time deciding on a plot for our story, it was a painful process.

Usually DI tournaments would start in-person at a regional level but with COVID-19 being a thing, the process changed to just handing in a video to be judged at the national level.

After many, many, MANY weeks of working on our challenge solution, it came to an end. Here is the final video;

We also made a Q&A video to go along with our challenge solution that explains some things that you may not have picked up in the final video;

One of my teammates also made this blooper video that I LOVE because it reminds me of how much fun we had during DI.

Overall, DI taught me leadership, teamwork, persistence, creativity, and so much more! I am really excited to see how I face future DI challenges in the years ahead of me. I want to say a huge thank you to my team members, Nolan, Jocelyn, Santiago, and Carter, without whom none of this would’ve been possible.

See you next year Destination imagination 👋🏼!

As always, Brooke.

Do I have a growth mindset?

Ah

Welcome back my friends.

I would like to present a book to you. This book is about something called a growth mindset.

I have been keeping a reflection journal as we learned about growth mindsets in class. I hope that you take a quick look through my book because I have been working pretty hard on it. Here it is;

 

The next part of this project is creating a statement/goal for my growth mindset. This statement will go along with a selfie of my face. MY FACE 😬. I think that the thought of a selfie of my face being in the class is a whole other challenge that I need to tackle  with a growth mindset. But what’s done is done and I know that I will move on from the embarrassment.

My statement for the selfie is “When I receive criticism, I will review my work with an open mindset and apply specific revisions so that I can feel more confident taking on academic risks when I know that I can deal with having a First Attempt In Learning.”. Now if you read my journal, you would know that I talk a lot about my fixed mindset on academic failure.

Page from my book

That photo is a page from my book where I went in-depth about my mindset on academics, achievement and failure. On the next page I talk about three things that I will try to do to change my fixed mindset into a growth mindset, and my selfie statement is basically trying to do the same thing.

My selfie w/ statement

I believe that this growth mindset challenge will be something that I have to work on for the rest of eternity and I challenge YOU to do the same. Thank you for taking the time to read my post and it would be awesome if you could leave a comment about something that you have a fixed mindset about that you want to change.

As always, Brooke.

Student Blogging Challenge; a reflection.

Hi everyone 👋🏼

Unfortunately this will be the last Student Blogging Challenge post for this year.

If you didn’t already notice, I have been taking part in the 2021 Student Blogging Challenge. We accomplished 10 SBC prompts for our blogs. You can find 10 similar prompts here.

I can definitely say that over the course of this challenge I have seen my blog and my blogging skills greatly improve. We started off the challenge with simply updating the about me page and making some commenting guidelines to improve the quality of our site. We also looked at the themes of our blogs and learned about blog layout. At the beginning, I was sceptical that I would really enjoy blogging. But now that I’ve had so much fun making cool posts, its not so bad.

I would have to say that my favourite SBC post would have to be either Worm the hero or A dive into literature; poetry. I was thinking of maybe doing a dive into literature series where I talk about different types of literature. Maybe I’ll crank another post out this spring break and keep it an on going thing? Possible topics could include classic novels, song lyrics, quotes, folklore, fairytales, legends, and if there is any other topics I didn’t already list, comment them down below!

The blogging challenge has given me the opportunity to learn how to express my ideas through a type of medium that I probably wouldn’t have used otherwise. I think that I have started to learn how to show my voice in my writing. Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

As always, Brooke.

p.s. – Here are all of the posts that I made in the student blogging Challenge.

Day 1- About me page

Day 2- Commenting guidelines

Day 3- Embedded content

Day 4- Fun with photos

Day 5- Appearance and Widget – this prompt wasn’t an actual post. I changed the appearance of my blog and added a calendar widget.

Day 6- Music

Day 7- Emoji story

Day 8- Blogging like a boss – Again this prompt wasn’t a post but more of a check-in on our summative blogging skills. We had to go through our most recent summative post and look at the aspects of a summative post that we should have included.

Day 9- holidays and festivities

Day 10- Free choice

A dive into literature; Poetry.

Welcome back to my post.

Now I don’t really like to boast,

But if your like me,

You’d like to be,

On the beautiful west coast.

Do you know what type of poem that is? It’s called a limerick. A limerick is a fairly common type of poem that you have probably heard before. Limericks are usually more humorous poems that always have five lines. They follow the pattern of AABBA, meaning that all of the A’s rhyme with each other and vice versa for the B’s. To make that even more clear, the first, second, and fifth line all rhyme, and the third and forth lines rhyme with only each other and are also shorter than the others. 

Other popular types of poetry are:

Haiku 

Free verse

Sonnet

Epic

Ode

And those are only a few!

Poetry can be used to share messages, tell stories, feel emotions, make someone laugh, and practically every other thing you can think of can be conveyed through poetry! You probably would have written some in Elementry school for Mothers or Father’s Day. 

I personally really like to read and write poetry in my free time. (correction- I actually have no free time because my horse has been oh so generous and filled all my free time for me.)

One of my favourite poetry authors is Edgar Allan Poe. My favourite poem of his is rather famous, its called The Raven.

It’s a rather dark poem, as most of Poe’s literature is, but I think that I could read it 100 times and like it all the same.

Anyhoo I think that my post should end here with a little poetry prompt for you;

I prompt you to write a poem about someone or something that you love. It can be any type of poem but I would suggest a sonnet or an ode.  

Thank you for reading.

As always, Brooke.

Het is Koningsdag

Welcome back to another Student Blogging Challenge post.

What holidays do you celebrate? Is there a holiday that your family celebrates that others may not have heard of? (Let me know in the comments!)

If you didn’t already know, I was born in Leiden, Netherlands. Ik spreek een klein beijte Nederlands. (I speak a little bit of Dutch.) And when I went back to the Netherlands in 2018, I learned about a holiday called Kings day or Koningsdag.

Koningsdag is a national holiday in the Netherlands. Celebrated on April 27th, the date marks the birth of King Willem-Alexander. Kings day celebrations include partying, wearing orange, flea markets, concerts, and more!

Here is a really short YouTube video of Kings day in Amsterdam;

Here is a poem that I wrote about Koningsdag.

It’s April twenty seventh.

It’s Kings day, there is no work.

Orange, a colour so bright.

Partying till the day becomes night.

The celebration, oh so lively!

The pubs, filled to the brim.

The canals, flooded with boats, 

With pure cheer, “long live the king!”

Here is the same poem but in Dutch:

Het is zevenentwintigste april.

Het is Koningsdag, er is geen werk.

Oranje, een kleur zo vrolijk.

Feesten tot de dag wordt nacht.

De viering, oh zo levendig!

De kroeg, gevuld naar de rand.

De grachten, overstroomd met boten.

Met pure blijheid, “lang leven het Koning!”

Well I hope that you learned something new and thank you for reading my post!

As always, Brooke.

How is it going?

Hello all 👋🏼

It is time for another summative blog post.

The project that we just finished it was called “how it started, how its going”, The title coming from a meme that boomed in early 2020. As you may have guessed, the meme was all about showing how something started versus the present. Here’s an example:

source

Before we go any further I should probably tell you what this project is. In this project we made a “how it started, how it’s going” meme with a painting from the Renaissance or medieval times being the “how it started” and a “how it’s going” of present day. We needed to do a bunch of research on the important historical events and worldview of the mediaeval and Renaissance times comparing to western worldview. The final Memes went into a virtual museum for all the world to see.

 

At the beginning of the launch,everyone had to make their own introductory meme comparing thebeginning of September 2020 to the present. Here was mine:

 

We also learned about establishing historical significance and what makes a great museum. We visited several virtual museums and took notes on what made them a good museum and what common similarities they had. We also looked at art from the medieval and Renaissance and took notes of what we noticed. All of that information was compiled into a MindNode so that we could easily refer to it.

Next we learned about worldview. Worldview (noun): a collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or group; the lens through which the world is viewed by an individual or group; the overall perspective from which the world is interpreted. You may have heard the term “western worldview” referring to the views and norms of western society. We learned that there are seven main aspects of worldview, society, knowledge, time, economy, values, geography, and beliefs. We did work on identifying worldview and how worldview is represented. Milestone 2 of this project was a collage about our personal worldview. We established historical significance of certain events in our lives and connected those events to our worldview. The collage was supposed to follow a story line that had an exposition, rising action, climax, falling actions, and a resolution, those steps are also known as a story mountain. In this milestone, I think that I showed how I can respond to text and construct critical and creative connections between myself, the text, and the world around me and be able to support my ideas with credible evidence. Here is the collage that I made along with a short explanation.

There is also a book of all of the collages that we made as a class. It is our companion book for the museum.

As I already mentioned, the end product of this project was an art meme in a virtual museum. If you have ever been to an art gallery or museum, you may have noticed that the art is usually accompanied by an artists statement about the piece. Therefore, to accompany our art we had to also have an artists statement. Our artists statement was an argument about what lessons from history we could apply to our worldview. Everyone was put into one of seven different groups, each group was representing a different aspect of worldview, and your argument and art were supposed to tie into that aspect of worldview. We previously did a lot of building knowledge on medieval and Renaissance times so that we could identify historically significant events that shaped our worldview in certain ways. I was part of the beliefs worldview group and here is my Argument.

Hopefully you have been curious about what the actual art was going to look like. The first step in making the meme was to find the portrait that would be used for the “how it started” side. Our main source for the art was Google arts and culture. I ended up choosing “Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi” by Raffaello Sanzio created in 1518. Then we took that art and made it our own by adding our face onto it. Everyone also edited and added things on the painting to show a specific statement about their worldview aspect. In all of this editing you had to use your technology creatively and be an empowered learner. I used an app called Procreate to edit my art with some help from another app called PicsArt.

My art was trying to show how beliefs help people make decisions. It would be great if in the comments you could tell be what your first impressions were about the statement of my piece.

Now  I haven’t really talked about the driving question to this project. It was “What can we learn from the past, and why does that matter to us today?” And I think that my Argument and History test answer that best. And if i had to summarize both of those long answers in one sentence it would be; “It is important to remember what happened in the past because we don’t want history to repeat itself.”

Here is the link to the final museum and I hope you enjoy!

As always, Brooke.