iBooks. You’ve probably read one at one point or another, unless you live under a rock

But they are really cool. And, as you know from My last post, we’re doing a unit on relegions. To refresh, we’ve been studying them, and we’ve been put in groups to study two relegions. A Western [which should be Eastern] Religion, and a New World Relegion. So, I was [stuck] partnered with Adam and Calum. We studied Confucianism and LDS, and I found out a lot about it.

Then we had to make an iBook on relegions as a class

Yeah. My world exploded. How do you even make an iBook? What? What!

Awkward Wat lady appeared. Anyways, we had to write an iBook. The first thing was all about roles. Who would do what, because we couldn’t all work on one thing at once.

There were writers, who wrote the physical text, videographers who worked on the videos to go in, the poets who worked on the poetry to go in the book, the illustrators who worked on all the drawings and edits, the widgeters who made the widgets, and the graphic designers who pulled the entire book together.

I personally was an illustrator. Along with Ryan Dent and James Seed. We did some pretty damn good drawings. Dent and Seed worked more on the main drawings, where as I made the pages. But I did this pretty damn good drawing:

Yeah, I’m proud of that. We did many illustrations, and I made pages. It was good. I don’t have many complaints for this one, besides Seed taking an entire class to draw one, non detailed drawing. We was probably gaming. But yeah!

That really all for this post

Read Ya Later,

Ruby

The Renaissanse, meaning rebirth. That’s our newest unit. It’s actually quite entertaining. For history, that is. The main, driving question for this unit was “How did the Renaissance affect our western worldview?”. We had to answer this in a visual, and a paragraph explaining said visual. But first, we had to research a Thinker, an Artist, and a Scientist or Mathematian. So, I chose:

Lovato Lovati. Mainly because his name sounds like Demi Lovato. But he did some cool things. He invented the barometer. Pretty cool.

Torricelli. Okay this guy also has a cool name. It sounds like some sort of pasta, which is cool. He was a scientist, and invented Torricelli’s law. It’s long and complicated, so I won’t explain it.

Raphael. The artist, not the ninja turtle. He painted some cool things, nothing about turtles, I found to my dissapointment.

So, once we had researched those guys, we had to answer the big question. I made a poster explaining how the Renaissanse influence our western worldview. It looks like this:

Lets do a quick run down of this. So pretty much it’s someone embracing all of the three major things that came out of the Renaissance. Thinkers, Artists and Scientists. But, that’s not all. If you look in the background, you’ll notice that the triangles go from grey to blue, showing that the Renaissanse really brightened up our worldview.

That was a lot of symbolism. And seriousness. I don’t like it.

Aaand the gif isn’t loading. Great. Well, as always…

Read ya later

Ruby

Hello! I’ve returned from the blog-writers grave to write another post

This one is about a field trip we did, to Richmond, more specifically the Highway to Heaven. Now, the Highway to Heaven is a road in Richmond that pretty much has a lot of religious practice areas [eg. Mosques, Churches, Monasteries]. So we went a s a class to see a few of those places, as our unit is on Relegions.

Okay, a bit off topic, but why is it a highway to hell but a stairway to heaven? Who knows?

First stop on our trip: The Vedic Cultural Center, dedicated to Hunduism. That was really interesting, as when you first walk in, you get a picture of one of the Hindu gods. I’m not too sure which one.

So we had to take off our shoes to enter the upstairs area. That was thankfully the one day I decided to wear matching socks. So we went upstairs and into the prayer area. That was really cool, because the wall has a cloud-like design, and the Hinduism symbol in the Center of the main wall

So then we entered the main room. It was really cool, because they had these statues of some of the gods.

Hindus have over 300 gods. I feel bad for the guy who has to remember all the names.

So back to the main room.

Apparentaly the statues’ outfits are changed every seven days, where as the statue of the All Mother [is that her name? Or am I confusing her with Odin?] is changed every day. The day we came, most of the statues were in Orange:

But the All Mother [possibly not her name still] was wearing gold

The lady showing us around was very nice, and she taught us a bit of yoga, or the Lotus Position

I couldn’t do it! Maybe because I was wearing jeans, or maybe because I have the flexibility of a steel rod. Either one was an excuse enough for me to sit normally. So we learnt a bit about the Hindus. Did you know that even though they have so many gods, they believe that they are all a reflection of one god? I found that cool. They think that God came to earth in different forms at different times, and that your soul is a reflection of God.

We left, and I got a cool photo of the leaf arches outside:

Then we moved onto

Stop #2: the first Buddist Temple

Now this one was really cool, and probably my favourite temple to go into. It was right beside the Vedic Center, and even the outside was amazing. Then we got to walk in. We had to take out shoes off, again. We weren’t aloud to take pictures until the end, so I didn’t get any photos of the Monk that showed us around. He taught us the Story of Buddha.

He then told us about being a Monk, which involves letting go of everything you hold close to your heart. Sorta like the real world Jedi.

There were many small Buddhas on the wall, which he told us represented the medicine Buddha:

The cieling was really high, and there was a lot of gold in the room. Then we left. On the way out, I saw this quite interesting sign:

I don’t know what you’re tripping on if you think that’s how anyone trips. Anyways, we then went onto

Stop #3: The second Buddist Temple.

Disclaimer: I didn’t know we were aloud to take pictures until halfway through, so my pictures are minimal here.

This one was really large. We were welcomed in, and we given hot chocolate. I liked it already. Then we were told about a guy who prayed for 90 days or something crazy like that, with minimal food or water. He died at age 80. We then went to the main area, where Kate and Adam burned incense.

It was a sign of respect to the Gods. We then walked around the place like monks, with out hands at heart Center, and we chanted something in a language which I totally forgot.

We didn’t look that cool, unfortunately 🙁

But we then reached the prayer area, and I had to put down my camera so we could do what the monks do to pray. They go into position three times before starting, and then pray for up to 45 minutes whilst chanting. It’s really cool. Then we learnt a bit more about the guy who prayed for 90 years. We did some more prayers, and then went back to the entrance. We got some candy, and I got some strange sort of caramel thing with a really salty rock in the middle. Then we went to….

Stop #4: Nanaksar Gurdwara Gursikh Temple.

That’s a mouthful. Ironically, that’s what we got. We ate lunch at the Sikh temple, which I quite liked. We then went into the prayer room, where there was a lady reading poetry from the Sikh religious book. Fun fact: there’s someone who reads that book at all times, and my Dad’s coworker’s dad reads that book at their local temple. We weren’t aloud to take pictures there, but I got some pictures of the prayer room upstairs which they weren’t using:

We learnt about Sikhism, and then we were sent home, at 3:20. Luckily, Willa and I have choir until 6:00, so I still stayed at the school and didn’t miss my bus.

So that was our highway to heaven field trip! It was really interesting, and hey, we got to miss school. So, yeah!

Read ya later

Ruby

 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted! But I’m back, and better than ever. Not really.

So this post is about Worlview. Now, for those of you who don’t know, worlview is… *googles it* A comprehensive world view or worldview is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society’s knowledge and point of view.

Pretty much it’s what your perspective on the world is. So we had to make a video, or an Explain Everything. It had to include animation, pictures, and, worst of all, voice overs.

Okay, so I absolutely HATE the sound of my voice on tape. So I procrastinated a lot before I had to do the voice over.

Yeah. But then it finally came to do the voice over, and I personally think that this entire video went pretty well.

Hooray for worldview. I think the hardest part about this was that we weren’t really given much direction. Mr. Hughes just said “here the app, and a few instructions on how to use it. Go”. So that was a bit tough for me, but I got around to it eventually. Since then we’ve worked a lot on religion, so look forward to that blog post soon!

Read ya later,

Ruby

So, this post is about my Student Led Conference, or SLC. In this, I’ll be showing off three pieces of work: One thing that I’m proud of, one thing that shows my growth as a learner, and one thing that shows my growth mindset.

Something that I’m proud of:

This year, I’m really proud of this year would have to be my science project on digestion. Not only does it have all the mandatory info for the digestion process, it’s also entertaining.

The Digestion Project Is Here

So, I’m really proud of this because it looks good, it teaches all the mandatory things, and I put a lot of effort into the stop motion. I worked on this with Willa, and she did some of the editing and the text parts. Together it turned out really great, and I hope we get a good mark (We haven’t been given a mark for it yet)

Something that shows my growth as a leaner:

I think that this one would have to be my Destination Imagination project.

I think it showed growth with my teamwork, because normally I’m used to doing everything on my own, and I don’t really do a lot of teamwork, but this really showed me that I can’t do everything on my own, and that if I’m in a team we all need to work together.

A great example of this would defiantly be working on the script. I was set on doing the script on my own, it was my thing. But then I got serious writers block, and I realized that this was exactly why we had a team, so that if someone got stuck we just got someone else to help. So I got help. Another thing was just at the start in general we were all just “we each have our own jobs, we work on that”. That was a good plan, but we really weren’t a team. So we had to use teamwork, and combine ideas. That really helped me with teamwork.

Actually, DI also helped me with my presentation skills. I used to hate doing presentations. I never spoke loud, I always looked at my feet, I had no confidence. But then we did our first Preformance of this, and we realized how much we needed to work on. First of all, our Preformance was supposed to be traverse staging. We completly ignored that, and face only one way. The next one was that we talked way to quietly. No one could hear us! And we didn’t have much confidence. We had our scripts with us, and we didn’t look at the audience. But then we did our second one, and we improved. Eventually, we got to the tournament, and we did great! This really helped me with presentation skills.

Something that shows growth mindset:

I think that the thing that showed the most growth mindset for me was  our Stitch in Time unit, or our quilts. When I found out we were making quilts, I didn’t have to have anything to do with it. But I decided to seize the challenge. I was put in a group with Sofia, Robbie, and William.

Then it came to writing the story. By the end of the period, we had nothing. But, instead of giving up, we decided to keep on going. We texted each other that night, and by the next class, we had a story. We wrote it no problem.

We next had to make the quilt squares. It was hard, because we got a lot of critisisms. But instead of thinking ‘ah, no. We suck at this’ we improved. And then we printed it, and it looked great

All we had left was to stitch the quilt and frame it. It took a lot of effort. I mean a lot. But we did it, and now it looks like this:

Fabulous, isn’t it? Yeah. I think that really showed my growth mindset.

So, that’s it! I did it!

Well, that’s all for this post!

Read ya later

Ruby

I’m back baby! never starting off a post like that again. Anyways, this post is about this thing that we’ve worked on for the past few months, called Destination Imagination, or DI for short.

Now, you’re all wondering “What is this DI?”. Well it’s good you’re here because that’s literally the entire post.

So, to explain it first. DI is a wonderful tournament where kids from all around go into one of the 5 categories (Structual, Technical, Fine Arts, Science, and Improv) to compete to win at Globals, were you win like five grand or something crazy like that. Our class decided to do it, and we each chose a category. Surprisingly, no one chose improv.

Well, I decided to go into the Fine Arts category. For this, we had to write up a mystery story, involving three suspects, a Techinical Clue to help solve the mystery, and two team choice elements. A team choice element is something where the team shows off their skills and interests.

My group was pretty good. It had Tatum, Simon, Marcus, Willa, Angela and Myself. And together we successfully got together the basics:

Time Period: 1970’s

TechiClue: Polaroid photos

Team Choice Element 1: Vest, made by Willa

Teacm Choice Element 2: Manequin head, made by Willa

Detective: Sarah Sawset, played by Willa

Suspect 1: Joker, played by Ruby (hi!)

Suspect 2: DJ, played by Simon

Suspect 3: Bouncer, played by Marcus

Police Woman: Police, played by Tatum

Unfortunaly, Angela had diving in Pentiction on the day, so we had to do without her. So, everything was fine. We had the script down, we were practicing, it was all great.

Then,

Our TechniClue wasn’t technical enough! It got dramatic, but I’m not saying any names here. Let’s just say that someone got mad, someone cried and everyone else felt awkward. Yeah. But we fixed it, we changed our TechiClue to fingerprinting. Our costumes were great.

We killed the Preformance. But the appraisers gave us 133 out of 200. But that was only on our Arts challenge. Then we had the Instant Challenge

The Instant Challenge is where you are given a task and have to do it in under eight minutes. Unfortunately, I can’t actually talk about what happened in the room where we did it, as we have been sworn to secrecy.

Side note: I searched up ‘oath’ on google for an image for this, and I somehow managed to get to ‘dog swearing’. In which I found this:

Yeah

Anyways, we rocked the tournament. We got 100 out of 100 on our Instant Challenge. Yay! It was a full day, and it was great. Then came deciding who wanted to go to the next level, which was Provincials.

Not a single soul in my group wanted to go. But, let’s be clear here

So bad. But no one else in my group wanted to go, so I’m trying to witch groups. No news on that yet, but I’ll change this when I find out

Thats all for now

Read ya later

Ruby

Also known as The One About Salad!

Salad

Because it’s about Caesar

Caesar Salad

Okay, so I’m not funny. Anyways, we did a unit on good ol’ Julius Caesar, as you know from earlier blog posts. Clickety Click Click Here

So, we did a lot of expansion on that unit. A lot. We actually read through the entire play, on a fabulous app called SIB Caesar.

I just found out that SIB sounds for Shakespeare in Bits (I totally thought it was Shakespeare in Boots and my mind…)

He looks good in boots.

Willa: He should have been a drag queen. But only for shoes, because everyone dressed like a girl back then anyways.

I’m getting way off topic. The point is that we did a Caesar unit, and went through the entire play on the app Caesar in Boots. Bits.

For each act of the play {there were five acts in total} we had to write response questions, and do a paragraph. Which I totally did not leave until the last minute…

At the end of the unit, we had a performance to do. One of the scenes from the play. So of course, my group (Sam Scheewe (I think this is how you spell his name), Spencer, and Willa) chose the scene with death. Not the scene where Caesar gets stabbed. The one where Brutus kills himself.

So, we were fine. “Yeah. We can do this”. But then a bomb was dropped on us. We had to change the script to modern language and remake the entire scene to make it modern.

Yeah. We had to figure out a new setting, which was hard. So us, being us, decided “Hey! Let’s be gangsters”. Because I can be gangster.

We re-wrote out play, and re made the characters. The final script looks somewhat like this right here

 

Then we had to preform it. First time went okay. We practiced, we had our scripts, we were fine. Then came The Actual Preformance. Oh god. We would have done it in the theatre on the Friday that everyone else was ther, but no. Sam was away, so we did it first thing on Monday, when we weren’t prepared, in the classroom. It failed. So bad.

But over all I learnt a lot from this unit, about Shakespeare and Caeser, and the Romans. Well, that’s all for how

Read ya later,

Ruby

Plot Twist: This post isn’t about a project! It’s about our Science class today! We went down to beautiful Deep Cove to look at something called a King Tide.

A King Tide is pretty much the largest tide of the year. It’s so high, the people with beach front houses had water in their stairs leading to the beach:

Yeah. Sometimes it can be so extreme that it can cause floods! Luckily, ours wasn’t as extreme as the header image.

A few more pictures of it:

Thats right before we got on the dock. Artsy.

That’s some stairs, we saw a closer picture before

Jellyfish!

Okay not the best quality, but I almost dropped my iPad taking this. Appreciate it!

Okay, short post, but I guess that’s why it The Mini One About The King Tide

Read ya later alligators,

Ruby

So, the other day, we started a new unit. On *drum roll*

JULIUS CAESAR! So, we’re not only learning about the Shakespeare version of him, but also the actual Roman guy. Yeah. So the first part of our unit was to do something called a Body Biography.

What this is:

It’s pretty much where you trace out someone’s body, and put symbols important to that person’s life in certain places. For instance, I love food, so in my body biography, food would go on my heart.

But, unfortunately, we didn’t do me. We did some old dude called Octavius Caesar. Yeah. He was Julius’s heir, and was a really famous military dictator. Here’s a breakdown of what we put where.

Heart: Three Rings With Icicles.

This shows that he had three broken marriages. Two of them were divorces. But even though he got married  three times, his heart was cold and hungry for power.

Spine: Crown.

Normally, the spine represents someone’s backbone. And Octavuis’s backbone was his kingdom, or his empire.

Hand: Sword.

This shows that not only was he strong mentally, but also physically. How else would he have been a dictator?

Brain: Lightning Bolt.

Yes, we did purposefully put this on his forehead to reference Harry Potter. I’m a nerd. Anyways, this shows that he thought a lot about power, and gaining it.

Yeah. Body biographies! That’s all for this post

Read ya later alligators!

Ruby

 

 

 

Back by unpopular demand: ME!!

No. I know everyone loves me. So, this post is about Star Wars! Well, our project on it. It was really cool. We had to pick a driving question, and base out project around that. But it had to be Star Wars related.

So, I love animals. So, of course, my question had to do with those things. “What Animals Were the Aliens In Star Wars Based Off Of?” Yeah, it sounds cool, right? It was! So, I worked really hard on it. I took a few select aliens, did some research on them, and tried to connect them to animals. It took a lot of editing, and I mean a lot! One of my best ones was about Gungans. You know, what Jar Jar Binks was. They’re so funny. Another good one I did was Wookies. Here it is:

Yes. So, I worked so hard on it, but then came the hard part. How was I going to present it? I thought about maybe a power point, but that would really work. The exhibit was more of a ‘walk around and see what you like’. No one had time to watch a power point! So I thought maybe a mobile? No, that would be so hard to bring in on the day, and where would I hang it? So I settled for a good old poster board.

So, it came to a few days before the exhibit. We had to design our little area to look like Tatooine. There were three things we had to have:

a) Decorations

b) Food/Drink

c) Entertainment

 

It proved difficult, as Tatooine is pretty much a barren landscape. But we managed. We had it seem like the bar, it was fun. We made Shirley Temples, which we called ‘Tatooine Sunsets”, and little tie fighter cookies:

 

It was cool. Our decorations were a table covered with black paper to look like a bar, with two stools. Then we had the two Suns, and orange paper over the lights. Our entertainment was supposed to be a Jedi Scavenger Hunt, but SOFIA forgot to hand them out! (I still hold a grudge to this day). We also dressed up, and Sofia made my hair into Princess Leia buns. Over all, it looked like this:

 

Yeah. Making the Tatooine Sunsets were hard! I had to bring in 8 LITERS of frozen orange juice! That’s a lot! James had to bring in eight liters of Sprite, which he only brought four of. Thank goodness Sofia brought in an emergency four liters. Phewf. Halfway through the exhibition, almost everyone had left Tatooine, and Quinn came in. He was dressed as Han Solo, and proceeded to chug anout five Shirley Temples, and acted drunk. I can officially say I got Han Solo drunk. Huh.

So, over all, the project went well! I’m really excited for when we do our larger project. It’s the same idea, but it doesn’t have to be Star Wars related this time. But I’m excited for that.

That’s for this post, so, as always

Read Ya Later, alligators!

Ruby