Xinyao’s Portfolio

Math Unit 2 Designing a Story Problem

January 7, 2026 / Xinyao

My Story Problem Work

1. Describe your story and what real-life situation it modeled?

My story that I wrote about was about this Sims game character’s energy level throughout the day, starting from midnight 00:00 till 00:00. This represents how the different activities that the character does will effect their energy level.

2. What part of your project are you most proud of? Why?

I am most proud of the story that we used for the problem, because sometimes I would play this game. So I connected that to this project.

3. What was the hardest part of creating your piecewise function?

I think the hardest part of this project was writing out all the calculations because it takes a long time. Since I had to write most of the steps of the calculations out and for some of the calculation parts I had to solve it using two ways.

4. If you could revise one part of this project, what would you improve and how?

I would want to improve my project on the story part. Because I got feedback from Ms. Baldwin, requesting me to clarify some parts of the story. For example, she suggested me to add the exact time stamps of what the character was doing.

5. What did this project help you understand better about piecewise functions?

This project made me understand that there are many real life situations that could be modeled using math. Moreover, it makes the situation visually shown. As an example of a marathon runner’s running pace over the race.

Art Mixed Media Self-Portrait

December 15, 2025 / Xinyao

Audience Insight

I want my audience to know that I have many hobbies and there are many things that I like. For example, in the right top corner the audience can see that I like the ocean and snowy places. Since I have snowflakes drawn on a ocean fish image. I spray painted my background using a mixture of bright yellow and light blue, giving an joyful and happy feeling for the artwork. I also used acrylic paint to paint out the ice cream blobs, small flowers, trees and fishes. I choose to use paint to add these symbols because I can layer them on other collaged paper and the board. It also brings every together more, since it is more flexible for me to add it on different areas and sizes on the board.

Risk and Experimentation

I had many risks when I was working with my art work, because I worried if it would look bad or ruin the whole piece. One risk was deciding whether I should start painting things on my art piece, because at first I didn’t know where to put the things. But after filling in the empty places, everything started coming together and feeling finished.

PE Swimming Water Polo

November 25, 2025 / Xinyao

GLOW

I did well on my swimming skills and water safety and treading water to keep myself floating on the surface so I could participate in the activity fine.

GROW

I need to work on transitioning from offense to defense, so I can help my team earn points differently.

Socratic Seminar Reflection

November 24, 2025 / Xinyao

Why did I pick this?

I picked this artifact because it shows how much I am participating in the conversation. In addition I can compare how long I’m speaking and how many times I’m speaking to the class average so I know where and what I need to improve on.

What does this show about me as a communicator?

This shows that I do have things to share since my total speaking time was 48 seconds but I only spoke 2 times. So I could work on finding a better way to enter and participate more in the conversation.

Art Kool Koor Visit Reflection

October 29, 2025 / Xinyao

1. Cultural Influence on Aesthetic Choices

Kool Koor’s Bronx graffiti background directly shaped his aesthetic. It gave him a calligraphic, rhythmic line (from “tagging” his name) and a dynamic, interconnected composition (from painting on trains and walls). He translated the street’s energy into a symbolic language in his studio work.

2. Environmental Impact on Art Creation

Street: Creates fast, raw, and large-scale art focused on public communication.
Studio: Allows for slow, reflective, and complex art focused on layered meaning and material experimentation.

Trying his style in a classroom, you could focus on his techniques (like drips and lines) as conscious choices, without the pressure of the street, turning his public energy into a controlled practice.

3. Personal Reflection on Aesthetic Development

In my future art, I think it will have a lot of colors, and cartoon characters. Because I like to use a lot of different colors and layers to make my art realistic and detailed. In addition, I really like to watch cartoons, so a lot of art pieces will be based on cartoons.

Group activity with Kool Koor’s techniques

Unit 1 Sticker Project Reflection

October 22, 2025 / Xinyao

I like how my sticker is very colorful and has a good composition.

I want to work on writing out the mapping rule for each section, because for some transformations I forgot to write the mapping rule.

Math Unit 1 Reflection and Goal Setting

October 22, 2025 / Xinyao

1. I chose question 3 from the COL as evidence of my best thinking because it shows that I know how to write a sequence of transformations that could map ABCD to A’B’C’D’. Which shows that I know how to correctly write accurate transformations.

2. I chose question 6 from the COL as evidence of my best thinking because I showed how to prove whether the two triangles are congruent. Before the unit I didn’t know how prove congruence, and now I know.

Throughout this unit, I improved the most …

at using the appropriate math language while performing rigid motions.

I feel that I still need to work on…

dilating shapes using different coordinate points as my center of dilation.

List three of your strengths so far this year:

Completing homework
Actively participating during class
Keeping my math notebook work clean and neat

List three things you want to improve on in the next unit:

I want to do extra practice provided by the teacher
Ask more questions
Be more precise when I am doing math problems

In the next unit, I want to …

get more fully correct problems than partial correct problems on the COL

What might get in the way of this goal?

I might not fully understand a math concept/standard.

What can I do if I get stuck or need help?

I get ask Ms. Baldwin about the problem, or do extra practice on this specific standard.

Language Arts Unit 1: First Contact

October 7, 2025 / Xinyao

This first unit of the year we focused on improving our grammar. Mr. Fisher wanted to make the unit more interesting so our activity of the unit was to tech a AI Alien how to speak english. We used what we learned from class and taught the alien how to use them. At the end of the unit, our own Alien had to write out a full paragraph using everything it learned from us, and tell the boss what it’s motives are, where it’s from. We had to use the paragraph from the Alien and have a conference with Mr. Fisher, showing that we actually understand the concept that we learned in class.

Art Unit 3: Exhibition

September 22, 2025 / Xinyao

In what ways can an exhibition influence the ideas, beliefs, and experiences of an audience?

Exhibitions can influence the audience through colors, shapes, materials, composition, culture, lines and arrangement of the masterpieces.

For example EI Anatsui’s After the Red Moon gives us information about the past in Africa. When North America can to trade slaves with alcohol, and the bottle caps that EI Anatsui used represents the history. Using the materials, EI Anatsui was able to create huge “fabric-like” pieces of bottle cap, and then he used the technique of different perspectives to present his masterpiece.

Another example is Vincent Van Gogh’s art, the use of his color and paint strokes show his emotions, his techniques. Specifically his emotions are important because it can show what he was going through during the time. So that is why he has a special paint stroke technique and color choice.

PE Unit 1 Table Tennis

September 4, 2025 / Xinyao

In this unit we learned how to play table tennis. We learned how to do back hand, front hand, and serves. We practiced drills for serves with a partner, and also different table tennis techniques. We applied our learning to this table tennis game called “Birwin”. Basically after 3 mins, we stop and who ever has the highest points move up a table and the other person moves down a table. During this unit we also played doubles with our friends.

I think one skill that I am good at is the front hand hits. And I would want to improve on better serves, because I have realised that people can keep winning points as long as their serve is very good and their opponents doesn’t hit it back.

Xinyao's Portfolio