Amy's Portfolio

U: What do you understand in this unit?

In this unit, I have built on to my knowledge about percentages and fractions in the past, though it is more of a surface level of what I learned. We had dove much more deeper about details and complexity of questions and how to solve them. I was also not very confident with my knowledge of percentage in the past while this unit helped me gain a better understanding.

N: What new information did you learn in this unit?

New information I learned in this unit was percent change, the formulas, better understanding of the relationship between percentage and fractions, etc. I had really learned lot of things that I was not as good as calculating in the past. Some of the economic vocabs also were a crucial part of my learning because it was important to know what “tax” or “interest” mean when answering questions or I could fail the whole test.

I: What was interesting in this unit?

I think the most interesting part was the formula new-original/original on how it is so useful when solving problems because I could apply it to every percant change problems.

T: What was tricky for you in this unit?

Something tricky for me in this unit was the relationship between tax and tip because I sometimes would mix up the steps of whether I should calculate tax first or the tip, or whether I should calculate the delivery fee adding the tax or not (this mostly applies to my final project, but I managed to overcome my challenges by double checking and asking my peers to help).

The essential question that I chose for my project is: what happens when our body gets sick? My knowledge from cells and body systems helped me answer this question when I dive deeper into research because I understand what organs are, from which system, and how it being malfunctioning would cause our bodies to have symptoms. Which in my case of researching about cystic fibrosis, is the pancreas impacting the respiratory and digestive system causing symptoms like wet cough and trouble absourbing fats and proteins. This supports the idea that the body is a system of subsystems made up of cells because the body is “connected” as a whole and the malfunction of one small organelle could impact the whole body, which my blind box CER would be explaining in detail on why the claim is correct.

The learning experience that was most impactful or memorable for me is the dissection and the independent research project for the blind boxes. Both of these experiences helped me better understand and learned more about the human body systems, which reflects that I am the kind of learner who learn from real life experiments and self-studying/researching. Though I was a bit confused with the dissection part and the organs inside a real frog/pig heart/pig lung, I later caught up from my research and then understood what was happening.

For the part I want to try to improve on is my CER because some how my science CER grades isn’t that good compared to other subjects; I would be likely to get a 3 on my social studies CER submission but I would need to resubmit for science to get a meeting (which I still need to work on my resubmission for the blind box CER today). It’s weird for me because I think I am pretting good with writing CERs, but probably because there is different criteria for different subjects so I can’t apply my social studies CER brain to science.

DON’T let them clip your wings.

This is my artivist piece, a sticker that I had drew using procreate in art class. The intended audience are people who lack self confidence or feels that they need to lose a part of their identity in order to fit in others. The message is like the words portrayed, don’t let other people “clip your wings”, or don’t let them make you question yourself on who you are. You need to fly high so that they couldn’t reach you, which also means, you need to keep a strong mindset of how you wouldn’t let them limit who you are.

I used repetitive angel/wing elements to express freedom, diversity and uniqueness, because not everyone would get a wing, but only the ones who are special. The word “clip” gives a jealous connotation for people will try to make you feel bad about being special, so they could control and keep you the same as the others. This emphasized on uniqueness that everyone could have their own strength, not just a wing, but it could be hobbies, academics or maybe even being good at gaming. I have also used multiple marks of red on both designs to show how harmful it could be. For the image on the left, it is more of pulling your wings out to fit in, but on the right side, it is more of cutting down your feathers so that you wouldn’t soar high or fly away. So the left one is more about jealousy and uniqueness while the sticker on the right is more about being controlled or other people putting you in disavantages.

During this unit, I had learned how to dribble, shoot, and I practiced skills learned last year in the sixth grade. Though my knee injury had recur, I still managed to do much more sport activities than last year where I sat out for the whole unit.

Something challenging during the unit was that my strength isn’t as strong as before, so after maybe a few minutes, I feel like my lungs are burning and my ear would hurt like I had dived deep underwater. Also, I had missed two lessons in this unit due to my swimming make up, so I don’t have the idea on what’s going on in the next lessons.

Something I did well is that like mentioned before, I manage to become more active and participated more than last year, also because my knee is slowly recovering. I manage to train my skills on being offense when I was mostly defense during elementary.

U: What do you understand in this unit?

This unit helped me build onto my previous knowledge on proportional relationships by letting us understand what it takes to get the dimensions from the original to the scaled copy.

N: What new information did you learn in this unit?

New informations would be scale factors and how to calculate them. I haven’t learned these before and got traumatized on my pretest for I don’t understand anything mentioned on there.

I: What was interesting in this unit?

I think something interesting for me in this unit is how useful the formula of scale factor=copy/original is. It could be used for any type of questions related to scale and proportional relationship.

T: What was tricky for you in this unit?

It was ok after I remember the formula of the scale factor because you can implement it to every questions. However, some questions could be harder to understand the logic and what steps you should do.

During this unit, I have built more skills on my swimming experiences that I gained from before. During second grade to fifth grade, I was in swim team and quit due to other hobbies that took more time and also lack of interest in it. (I had quitted a lot of sports at the start of sixth grade due to knee injury.)

I think the whole unit isn’t as challenging because I have previous experiences and skills. However, I feel like the artistic swimming is a bit harder because I will need to hold my breath for a longer time to finish the routine and moves inside the water. Some of the diving skills is also a bit challenging because I forgot how to do a dive, probably due to the lack of knowledge of diving before (I had a hard time learning how to dive in third grade and fourth grade), and I am not that comfortable with diving head first into the water because I would get water up my nose.

My final clay piece and my name drawing reflect different aspects of my identity by including different symbols. For the clay project, I first planned out to make a jar and create a paper airplane to fit inside, showing dream or freedom(?); however, my project didn’t really followed what my plan was. I kind of gave up on the thought because I don’t know how to make a paper airplane so I made a square shaped container (?) instead. I then drew random decorations, which then turns out the be the symbols of representing my identity. I had also included the symbols for my name drawing design. I had used the alto clef to represent my interest and love in playing the viola, and I chose to draw the alto clef instead of the viola itself because a viola 99.9% would be mistaken as a violin, and so the alto clef emphasize on the uniqueness of the viola and how special I am as a viola player. I had also drew symbols that represents my favorite groups in kpop.

I think I demonstrated persistence by not giving up when not knowing how to make the paper airplane and overcoming it by creating another shape that turns out to also look as good as the paper airplane. In addition, for the name drawing, I sometimes use colors that then turns out not as good as what I expected. I didn’t then chose to start again, but to continue on and add more details to make it look better.

During this unit, I had build on to my knowledge that I learned in sixth grade and previous training on volleyball. I had learned more on underhand serving, setting and bumping. Some challenge I face in this unit is that my hand strength isn’t as strong as before and cannot serve overhand over the net. I had tried to reposition my hand to gain more power when serving, but it didn’t work, so I used underhand serves. Something I am the most good at is probably bumping because I still have the muscle memory and ability from fourth-fifth grade when playing volleyball outside of school. Something I can do to improve on my arm strength is to start exercising and I have also signed up for baseball, which can also improve my arm strength.