Jacob's Portfolio

Throughout this unit in health, we have dived deeper into the topic of understanding brain development and how it effects the many emotions that you can have. These emotions can be easily found on a Mood Meter. We also studied the functions of the stress, and strategies for building resilience and self-regulation. One very important fact that we learnt about a teenagers body that is of high importance is that the amygdala (located in the limbic system) develops much faster than other parts of the brain such as the prefrontal-cortex which is crucial for the orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals, and the hippocampus which is involved in memory, learning, and emotion. It also plays a role in emotional processing, including anxiety and avoidance behaviours. This means it is much easier for a teenagers to have a quick increase of cortisol levels, leading to your brain to be triggered into a fight, flight, freeze response. Situations like these can easily cause distress, but practicing mindfulness, which enables you to develop the skill of taking a Meta-moment and perhaps find your breath anchor in order to not only gradually regulate your emotions but to reduce the likely consequences of the situation. Another vital part about this health unit that we studied and researched about was negativity bias and thinking traps. These concepts highlight how our minds can distort our perceptions and experiences, often leading us to focus on the negative rather than the positive. Negativity bias refers to the psychological phenomenon where negative events or thoughts weigh more heavily on our minds than positive ones. For instance focusing on the one mistake you made on a test though you did very well and that one mistake causing a series of negative thoughts.

Thinking traps are another consequence of this bias, where our cognition gets caught in a web of distorted thinking patterns. Common traps are like Catastrophizing, which is where you think of the worst possible outcome of a situationover, another is generalization, which makes us draw broad conclusions from a single event. Recognizing these traps is essential, as they not only cloud our judgment but also affect our emotional well-being. In conclusion, this unit in health helps us understand the development of our brain and how we can regulate our emotions to pave the steppingstones to an enhanced future caused by the power of our positive decision making. 👍👍

1. The math we used for this project was rates and ratios.
2. Something we could of done at the timed trials was try to walk at our normal speed because some of my partners were tired that day which caused them to walk slower, but on the day of the race they were not as tired which changed their walking speed.
3. We used meters per second during our timed trials. This was important because if we used other units such as tiles it would be much harder because we didn’t know where we would be racing.

The African penguin population is declining at a rate that threatens their existence on this planet. The main cause of this population decline is the result of humans using their guano which they use for fertiliser. African penguins use their guano to build nests which they use as homes to protect themselves from predators, and to nurture their eggs.  If humans continue to remove the African penguins guano

then the long term affect will lead to their extinction. This is why we have created Peng-house, this is the future of the penguins. It has all the best insulators and has the lowest mass change with a change of only 2.5 grams it also stops predators from coming in with strong sturdy wood protection. It has a flapped door entrance to fit the penguins too. So, as you know we need to build artificial nests for the penguins and stop taking their guano. This is the perfect artificial nest to save the penguins from extinction. 

Why have a digital portfolio at SAS?

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: