Nina's Portfolio

My artwork is a reflection of the pieces of me that I see on the canvas. And like me, this artwork is ever-changing. The symbols I chose will change their meaning to me in a few years time. They will keep changing, just like I will. The message I want the audience to see is that joy and beauty surround us in everything we do. Volleyball is an important part of my life, but it doesn’t only represent the sport to me. The panels on the ball represent the parts of me carefully stitched together to make who I am. For me it means the joy of winning, of being part of a team. When I get to highschool, I know that meaning will have changed. Even so, it will still be me. All these different parts of me I put on the change are so beautiful and changing, yet it will always be me and who I am.

During the creation of my artwork, I went in blind with collaging, but I knew that if I made a mistake, it was still me. When I wanted to draw on the maple leaf, I knew that it was going to be a risk, and I didn’t know how to make one, but I still tried to make it happen. Not following my planning was a risk that the artwork wouldn’t turn out how I wanted, but being able to change things with how I had changed between planning and creating the artwork felt right. I changed the four leaf clover to the newspaper and tissue paper. Instead of the clover representing my luck, the newspaper represented who I was and how my story was coming together. I took time to plan out how I would glue down different parts of my artwork to make it look like the pieces I collaged would be bursting up from the corners, like they were being pulled to the middle. I feel like the risks I took, even if I didn’t make it exactly how I wanted, the mistakes make it more human and more me.

One of our most recent units in PE was our water polo unit. Water polo is a game that’s really similar to handball except for the fact that it’s in the water. I really enjoyed this unit. I’m a decent swimmer when you think about the basic strokes, but I was surprised at the fact that I was better than a lot of people at swimming with my head above the water. I think that this is probably because in the summers, I spend a lot of my time on the lake, so that means that I learned to swim with my head above water because I don’t usually wear goggles. I also thought that catching the ball was pretty easy, and I think that’s because I have big hands. I enjoyed this unit, and I thought it was fun.

1. Cultural and Aesthetic Choices

Kool Koor grew up in the Bronx, so he saw a lot of graffiti as a kid, and that’s when he began doing graffiti. When he started making art, he worked really aggressively with the paint, which could be from the fact that when you make graffiti, you have to work fast. Over time, his art style evolved from being faster and aggressive to being slower, which created a cleaner result. He also changed his style to be more focused on his identity.

2. Environmental Impact on Art Creation

During the art workshops, Kool Koor worked slowly, and everything felt really relaxed, so that could be a result of his transition to the studio from painting on the streets. We can also see the difference in his artwork. Some of his older pieces seem rushed, and as the pieces get newer, you can see that the lines are cleaner and the colours are brighter.

3. Personal Reflection on Aesthetic Development

I think that after the workshop, layering is going to be something that appears in my future artistic choices. I think that using layers can symbolize the layers of a person, especially if an art piece represents identity. It can show how a person changed, and different parts of a person.

During our first unit in French, we read La Guerre Des Jumeaux, which is a story about two twins who don’t get along, but have to learn how to so they can find their lost dog. It was a short book, but it was able to get the narrative across effectively. I think that the book was fine for vocab, but as a book people would read for entertainment, the plot was very cliché, but I think it helped improve my reading comprehension skills.

During this unit, we had to do spelling quizzes based on vocabulary from the novel. Most of it was on Quizlet, which I was what I mostly used to study. I find that as long as I do it enough, just looking at words and using flashcards is really effective.

Towards the end of the unit, we had to do an Oral exam, where we had to tell the story based on images given to us. To prepare for this, I wrote down a sentence for each image and tried to memorize them. During the exam, I forgot the last few, but I remembered the first ones.

I think that I did a decent job on this. I definitely could have done better if I had more time to memorize, but I don’t think that this was bad by any means. The feedback I got on this was that I needed to write simpler sentences and that I should articulate more when I’m speaking.

I’m proud of how I was able to improve my French in a year, because at the start of last year, I was completely lost and had no idea how to write. Now I think that my pronunciation is a lot better than it was, and I think that being able to write longer sentances is good, but I don’t know enough to read them from memory.

My current goal is to get better at writing CERs, because I struggled the most with writing them in science last year. To get better at writing CERs, I looked back at my grades last year and found my common problems. I found that I often struggled to connect my evidence to the reasoning, which was likely caused by me rushing through writing the paragraph. Now, I’m trying to slow down and focus on my writing. I think that recently my CERs have gotten better and that I’m going to keep improving.

What are you most proud of in this class so far?
(Think about times when you showed persistence, improvement, collaboration, or deep understanding.)

I’m most proud of my meteorite model, because I put a lot of effort into it, and I was able to put all the information into it without using up too much space.

What has been your biggest challenge in this class?
(For example: managing time, staying focused, contributing in group work, or understanding a concept.)

I think that sometimes I would miss something in the instructions, and I would have to add it in a rush so that I would meet the requirements.

How have you demonstrated the qualities of an Active Learner — preparing effectively, participating fully, collaborating well, staying positive, and reflecting to improve?

 Are there any areas where you want to grow or improve next quarter?

I want to improve on my efficiency because I think that towards the end of unit one, I slowed down on my efficiency, and that meant it took me longer to finish my work.

I chose question 1 as evidence of my best thinking because it best shows my understanding of transformations, such as reflections and translations

I chose question 5 as evidence of my best thinking because it shows my understanding of triangle congruency, as I was able to state what information was needed to say the triangles were congruent.

Throughout this unit, I improved the most at transformations because I had no idea how transformations worked before this year, and now I think I have a pretty solid understanding of how transformations work.

I feel that I still need to work on angles and triangle congruency because I felt really lost during topics two and three, and I think that part of it was because I missed grades 5 and 6, which probably also caused me to start feeling lost at the end of 7th grade too.

During transformations I was able to learn relativly quickly all the new types of transformations, and the only thing I struggled with was dilations, but that was just me getting confused between negative scale factors and scale factors that were decimals.

In unit two, I want to be able to remember different topics and subjects better, because on of my biggest mistakes was forgetting how some transformations worked. I also want to be able to cut down on mistakes that are made by not paying attention, and to do this I’m going to make going back to check my calculations a habit.

In the next unit, I want to be able to get a better understanding of the topics so that I can minimize mistakes on tests. Most of the mistakes i make on tests are because I didn’t pay attention to what I wrote down.

I think that the thing that’s going to get in the way of me getting my goal done is me trying to rush through the problems or me not understanding the material. If that happens, I’m either going to catch myself and slow down, or ask a teacher for help about the material.

Our first unit in language arts was about grammar, because it was shown that grammar was consistently one of the weakest skills for students. To do this, we used an AI bot to roleplay as an FBI agent teaching an Alien English. We began by learning about different parts of sentences so we could better teach the alien. After this, we had classes where we would have twenty minutes of independent time before having the rest of the class to work with the alien. At the end of the unit, we had an interview with Mr. Fischer, where we showed how we taught our alien different parts of speech. The biggest thing I learned was about how connotation and denotation worked, and why we used layers of meaning. We use layers of meaning to manipulate a readers feeling towards a situation, character, or item.

Last week, we went on a trip to the art museum in Pudong. When we went in, we were given the essential question: In what ways can an exhibition influence the ideas, beliefs, and experiences of an audience?

As we walked through the exhibition, we began answering the question in our sketchbooks. The piece of paper I had fell out, so I had to write the question out. I think that artworks can show new ideas and experiences by depicting the idea or experience in the artwork, maybe by painting it out, or showing it more subtly, like El Anatsui’s work, by imitating the Kente cloth with bottle caps, symbolizing African history. I think that influencing beliefs is a bit harder, however, as beliefs are made over time, but I think that it can still happen. An artwork that shows a larger issue, whether it be something that happens now or earlier in history, can influence beliefs by showing events, or it can more subtly show a message and it can cause people beliefs to shift or be strengthened.

I think that I should have tried harder to keep the ball in, because that was the main reason I lost points during games. I also think I need to focus on getting the ball over the net because I hit the ball into the net a lot. I do think i got better than i was last year, so that’s good.

Our first art project was to design our sketchbook covers. To find inspiration, I looked online at other people’s covers and found some I liked. I sketched a rough design of what I wanted the cover to look like. I had sketched out the star, the little sprites, and most of what ended up on the cover. I feel like the little sprites are like figments of my mind. I’ve doodled them wherever I could, and it would have felt wrong not to put them on the cover. The star was from a cover I found on Pinterest. I wish I could have made a darker red, but I was rushing to finish at the end. I made the star a darker red when the rest of the cover is pastel and light to try and bring more attention to it, but the white in the background of it balanced it out. I added the little white dots because I felt the bottom right corner looked empty and imbalanced. I added stars when I was sketching out the design on the cover, but I changed it because it would have been too much. I changed the way the dots went so it would cover more of the empty space. I like the way this turned out, and I don’t think I would change anything.