18smiths blog heyy killjoys;)

In PE we started our second unit on fitness. We were told to basically say but we would like to improve on for the next few years when it comes to fitness, because we can work harder on the things each individual would like to improve.

I would like to improve my cardio-vascular endurance, because even though I can run pretty well, I still have a lot of area to improve on and I can get faster, for sports I will be doing next year like tennis, basketball and soccer. Also maybe better agility for running, so I can run faster for a longer amount of time. I would also like to improve my muscular strength, specifically in my core, because I would generally like to grow stronger there, as well as upper arms for tennis, so I can hit harder. Also I will need most of these components for high school teams.

So basically in Science class we have been learning about elements like yeah. For a poster we needed to pick any element in the periodic table and basically write about what it is used in, how it helps society and how it damages society.

What are you proud of in your poster?

I am proud of the information on the poster, for example I think I did a good job explaining how boron helps society but I forgot to put the paper on for how it ruins society.  I am also proud of like I laid the poster out in general because I think it looks pretty nice.

What would you do differently if you did this again?

Since I forgot to add the how it ruins society I wish, I had remembered to put it on because I think I had a wide variety of information on it. Also I think if I just spend more time on it I would have written more about what its used for.

So during Tutor class, we have been working on what is bullying and what it’s really about. So this is what we have been doing basically.

What is bullying?

Bullying is basically,when one individual or group of people hurt someone or a group of people  either with words or just physically , and then the person who gets bullied can’t stand up for themselves, or feels helpless to respond.

What are the forms of bullying?

There are few different types of bullying like the main ones are,  physical and verbal. Physical involves doing harmful things to  another  person’s body. For example: biting, kicking, pushing, pinching, hitting, tripping, pulling hair, any form of violence. Physical bullying is also sometimes messing with another person’s property.  Examples include: damaging or stealing. Verbal bullying involves speaking to a person or about a person in an unkind or hurtful way. For example: teasing, name calling, phone calls, spreading rumors or hurtful gossip. Cyber bullying is also form of bullying where, a person  or group goes online and says bad things about them,  making facebook pages about them, posting on peoples facebook wall’s saying things like “You Suck”, “Your Ugly”, “Go Die”.

What strategies do you have to cope with bullying?

Finding a friend that you can talk to, making sure to stay positive about yourself and not blaming it on yourself. Make fun of it, and be like I really do “suck” as a joke just to ignore it. Tell someone you know and trust and ask them to help you. Stand up to the bully, when it begins or else it will continue, when you stand up to them make sure that you really get to them. But to be honest people don’t really do these things they usually get scared and don’t do it but, these things you should try to do because even though they may be hard to do but they really work.

I think my strengths for my work, were maybe the layout because I always tried to change it and make the layout, something that really brings out the drawings even though all of the them aren’t the best. Another strength I think would be the colors, I guess because I tried to use like different colors to express the different days even though on one of my pages there was a picture of a fire and then a light blue which was like to just use a opposite color I guess. I think some of my weaknesses were making some of the pages come to life and like maybe making more details in the drawing and using more color because some of my pages were sort of blank. Also I think the accuracy on my drawing weren’t always good enough, for example the bicycle I drew weren’t very accurate to the picture I was drawing it from. Also the climbing wall wasn’t accurate either. I think I really could have improved by mistakes if I spend more time on the drawings and making details rather then the amount of drawings I drew. I also did improve my day 2 which was first with no mountain drawing only with the leaf and the drawing I improved it by drawing a colorful mountain, to make it look more creative and have a burst of colors on the page. Also I improved my drawing of just a black page with stars on it by adding the words flowing out of the moon with white paper lines. In conclusion I think I did okay overall because I think some of my pages weren’t done to the fullest detail so I could have tried a bit harder to work on the pages but out of all I am actually proud of some of my pages because I think before this unit I wouldn’t have been able to have that level of creativity and been able to make different layouts that make the drawings look good.

On Tuesday of this week we went to the Ueno Zoo and then to the Tokyo National Museum. We had to wake up early and go to the playground at 8:30 where we all walked to the train station and took the train all the way to Ueno.  I haven’t been to that exact museum but I have been to one similar in Bashamichi where it had more of the boat history.I was expecting  to see more of the type of buddha history but there was actually more art which I also enjoyed(:  When I was at the museum I was thinking a lot about the history and how each artifact told a really good story.

In the museum I found this really interesting statue, that looked like a Japanese version of a hades or a evil sprit, I thought it was interesting because it had a lot of details on the statue like having a horse type of faces on the knee caps. The statue was made with wood and carved by Kongbu-ji Wakayama and was from the Kamakura Period which is the 12th-13th century. The actual statue is called the standing Jinja-daisho. I think the reason this piece was made was to symbolize evil sprits. I think this is a unique piece because of the little art work in every part of the statue. The expression of the statue makes you tell he is angry or evil.

What really made me wanna look further into this statue is that it had a very interesting look and it had good detail so it made me more interested to look at it. I think what I could learn from that in Japanese culture is some of the demons and “bad guys” in the Japanese history.  I think the statue connected to early humans because thats probably the one that was most similar and also it probably reflected some of the earlier japanese myths.

I think that the statue has really no connection with the the silk road because its from a part of asian which the silk road route and didn’t really relate that much to the trades but I think that it some how connects to the items sold there because in the history of the silk road like the famous silk road statue of justice. Also I think the reason Japan doesn’t have many connections with other countries because the silk road was created during the second century B.C. when China first made serious connections with the greeks and Japan wasn’t founded until 600 B.C.

Below is my evaluate reflection during this unit we would usually just write our reflections up our blogs but this time we have done a video, my previous reflections were for the Investigate, Create and Plan

This unit in science we have been focusing on forces. We did a experiment which was made to teach how to understand the forces,  where we tried to protect a egg while it was dropping off a roof by creating a box we things like cotton,marshmallows:p,bubble wrap etc. We first were to told to make a 20cm by 20cm cubed  box that had to equal 60cm cubed in total, then we made another more challenging one that  had to equal total of 30cm cubed in total.

As I said before are method was to make a box which was to make a box that was a total of 30cm cubed, then try to make a method to keep the egg uncracked when it reached the ground. We tried to make the egg not crack by using many materials that would compress when it reached the ground so it would slow down the box as well as slowing down the impact.The first time me and my group did the experiment it worked but the second time when it was a smaller box the egg broke.

The reason some of the experiments worked and others didn’t is probably in my groups case because we only cushioned the top not the bottom so the impact from the bottom was to fast and caused the egg to crack and the other groups whose eggs didn’t crack had soft materials all around the egg which caused it not to have as strong of a impact.

A few thing I would have like to improve was the quality of the maps that I had hand drawn because I didn’t put that much thought and time into them so I think If I worked harder on the illustrations so they would be more clear and easy to read. Also I thought that I could improve my work by adding more photographs because sometimes it parts of my article it is just a lot of writing with no color which I don’t suppose is very interesting. I thought that I wouldn’t have rushed as much at the end because that is a part of the reason I couldn’t get alot of the drawings to be as interesting and worked hard on.

My three goals from parent-student conferences that are coming up pretty soon are:

1.in math to pay more attention in class and improve my knowledge in general especially with division and probability.(my progress from the beginning of the semester is okay i think I have gotten better with the probability but I think in the future I need to work on division because sometimes I don’t understand what it means.)

2. to add more in class discussions(the progress I’ve made with this is only in some classes that I’m not afraid to share my ideas in and in the future to make sure I really share my ideas is to not be held back by not knowing what I wanna say is right or wrong but weather or not I really thought into what is on my mind.)

3.not to procrastinate with homework and school work (the progress I’ve made is a lot from the beginning of this semester because I’ve been more comfortable and i haven’t rushed a lot of my work but I think I still need to work harder on this in the future by focussing hard and not being distracted by other things.)

During tutor group a few days ago we played the telephone game .What happened when we played this game was each time a different person came up with a long sentence that was just random and we would whisper it into the persons ear next to you and we would try to keep the same sentence going until the end but it usually didnt work out well,most of the time it would turn into a totally different sentence.We did to help understand how rumors can change just from what different people think.Also how this represents rumors in school by sometimes making up things to just harm people or just spreading a rumor it can turn into a total different situation.