I experimented with digital art using Procreate and had a great time exploring various patterns and strokes. I particularly enjoyed creating a marbled effect and a design featuring circles with mini circles inside.
Title: The Dreamhouse
This is my favorite piece of artwork from the whole year. I loved creating a model of an installation, with nostalgia emerging as a central theme. I used pastel shades of paint, soft fabrics, and avoided hard edges or plastics, creating an inviting space for viewers to enter and reflect.
Title: Snake pottery
I really enjoyed working with clay in this project. I think it was great way to combine my knowledge from technique ( coiling and pinch pots) with my own aesthetics in creativity, (the metallic color and snake).
Healthy Relationships: I feel good about the trust, respect, and honesty that exists in all of my relationships, including dating relationships, if applicable.
Organization: I am happy with the way I organize my priorities, ensuring that I have enough time to dedicate to all the different aspects of my life.
Stress Resilience: I feel good about the support I get from others when I have something big going on in my life.
Care for the body: I have positive feelings about my relationship with food (what I eat, why I eat, and how often I eat.
School and Work: I feel good about the way my school/volunteer/sports/job performance is helping me to build my future .
Spirituality: I am involved in an activity that really matters to me.
Handling Emotions: I avoid using alcohol, other drugs, and addictive behaviors to deal with my emotions.
Rest and Play: I feel good about the people with whom I spend my free time.
My woop goal is to be closer to my family and friends in New York. The challenge is the time difference between China and the U.S. It can be hard to find the right times to talk, but I’m determined to make it work. I know that the effort I put into these relationships will be worth it, helping me feel closer to family and friends despite the distance.
I did this by texting my favorite cousin, Maya, every week and we planned the trip to see eachother in New York.
Looking back on my wish to connect more with my family and friends in New York, I realize how important these relationships are to me. I chose this wish because I really value the support and joy that come from staying close to my family and friends. Especially Maya, she never judges me for anything, and I never judge her. We have a relationship like no one else, no one knows what it’s like to be us.
This unit taught me how technology can affect body image and healthy lifestyles. Social Media influences the way we perceive our bodies, including the way an app’s algorithm would further recommend toxic content such as fake gym videos, only eating healthy food, and perfect bodies. This can lead to the potential for any user of social media to develop unhealthy habits and mental health conditions.
Despite social media’s toxicity, there are still apps advocating for healthier habits, such as journaling apps that allow users to share positive thoughts each day, or app blockers that force users to focus on the important tasks given.
We also researched mental health conditions and society’s impact on mental health. For example, stigma is a term used to describe the negative connotations people would associate with mental health conditions. This is often associated with the portrayal of mental health conditions in the media. TV shows or movies often exaggerate conditions; at a more extreme level, the media would portray people with mental health conditions as “monsters”. Embarassingly, I used to think that people with OCD always keep things organized and neat, such as color-coding everything in their house.
However, after this unit, I now recognize that OCD is a condition that people struggle with, having their brain tell them to repeat an action over and over for a reason. Such as excessively washing their hands, leading to small cuts on the hands.
After my classmate and my group presented other mental health conditions such as Bipolar disorder, Anxiety disorder, Eating disorders, Depression, etc. I’ve noticed similarities between these disorders.
These disorders often correlate. For example, someone struggling with an eating disorder could lead to depression or vice versa.
These disorders have treatment, mainly medication or therapy. However, not all of these are curable, so people could potentially struggle with this their whole lives.
These disorders could also affect one’s social life; they may feel excluded from group activities and friend groups.
After this unit, I believe that as middle schoolers, we should create an environment with empathy and support. If we know someone struggling with a mental health condition, we should always be there for them and ask how we can help, and guide them to professional treatment. If we are struggling with a mental health condition, we can talk to a trusted adult and seek for professional treatment whether that’s therapy or medication.
As teenagers, our pre-frontal cortex is not fully developed. So, we don’t have a strong sense of right or wrong decisions, this can lead to stress buildup. This unit taught me the negative and positive coping strategies to build stress resilience. My favorite part of the unit is the mini-quiz on our life skills such as organization or rest and play. I like this because it allows me to understand the positive aspects of my life and the negative ones I need to work on. Then, we place this data into a wellness compass. One thing I can improve is my thinking towards scenarios, defined as thinking traps. I often find myself imagining the worst outcomes in a situation, resulting in overthinking before the event happens, this is negativity bias. I also enjoyed the presentations we did on mindfulness, specifically teaching the class about stress resilience strategies. I started journalling every time I felt an intense emotion such as happiness or anger. I let go of my thoughts into a journal and sleep soundly into the night.
Creating a portfolio, or blog is a great way to collect all the work you’ve done throughout your academic career. You can include academic, athletic, and personal artifacts or experiences that you want to share with a wider audience. This is a great way to organize all your learning in one place and you can take it with you when you leave SAS. When you make your portfolio, you create posts that are categorized according to your subject. Some categories have already been set up for you, but if you need more categories you can add them as needed. It’s important that your posts have the following:
An engaging title – this should not include the name of the subject since this is referenced in the category. Think of this as the first opportunity to engage and hook your reader!
Body – this is where you share your learning. This should include a combination of text and media in the form of images, graphics, and embedded videos. You should always consider how your post looks to your audience. Is it engaging and organized? Do they want to keep reading?
Category – select one that has been set for you or add a new category. Posts can have more than one category e.g. Humanities and Myself as a Learner
Tags – create tags that can be used as keywords to describe your post. Tags help organize your post a little more! Aim to have 3-5 tags for each post. For example, if you are posting about a novel you wrote, you might want the following tags: #Fiction, #MurderMystery, #Theme, #PlotDiagram
Click on the images below to find a few helpful tips for creating your posts, adding media, and making categories:
