This year, since I’m a year 7, I get to do Tech. Tech is available to only years 7/8 so I only started doing it this year. For me, Tech is not what its name implies. I say that because if I say tech, someone’s brain would lengthen it to ‘technology’, but for us, tech is a shortening of technology but we are not using technology. Well, only partly. I say partly because I am doing woodwork and electronic tools like drills and sanders technically count as technology. Every term, we switch what we are doing. There are four Tech classes.

Sewing, Robotics, Woodworking and Cooking. I am doing Woodworking. So far in Woodworking, I have made a spatula, a box and four dice. The box is a wooden box specifically made for myself. It has a hinge lid and a temporary divider that you can take out. (That’s what temporary means). I have used a variety of tools and the teacher is very good at telling us exactly what we need to do.

I have used sanders, hammers, scroll saws, drills and much more. For those of you who don’t know, a scroll saw is a vertical serrated blade that when you turn it on, it goes up and down very quickly and cuts away at wood very quickly and in a straight line. The bigger version of this is a band saw, which is the same thing but with a much bigger blade.

Have you ever done any woodwork (even if that ‘woodwork’ was whacking some nails into a plank with a hammer)?

Last week we finished doing our Body Percussion. For those of you that don’t know what Body Percussion is, it is a form of music that’s only instrument is your own body. There are a lot of ways to make sound with your body (excluding our voice) including patting legs and/or torso, clapping, stomping, clicking your fingers and more. But last week, since we were finishing that subject that week, we did a quiz on it. The quiz was all about learning the musical notes like minims, crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, and rests.

There wasn’t all that much about body percussion in general, but we already knew a lot about that and not too much about the music notes. This was also important due to the fact that we were doing a task on it. This task was that we had to choose from a collection of music notes in a template on Google Drawings, and put them into a place. We didn’t get to choose which notes individually, though. The music notes were each in bars that we could choose from.

We had to put twelve of them into place and then write under them what type of body percussion that note would be. Each note had its own body percussion. For example, if there was a 1-beat note, I could write under it click, stomp, clap, or any other sound you could make with your body excluding your voice. This quiz was only for the people that had finished that task though, so for the people that did (including me) it was sort of a reward for finishing our task. Here is a picture of the completed task that I had to do to be able to do the quiz.

Have you ever played or done a task on any of the types of music?

This week we are learning about Holy Week and the Easter Triduum (pronounced Tridium). Though for this task, we focused on Holy Week. We had to do three tasks. In one, we had to identify the bible story and drag the blue box to its appropriate column after making a summary of the story. I will show a picture of the tasks after I explain them. Here is a picture of this one:

For the second task, I had to take boxes and then place them into the blanks in the text to fill them in according to what I know about Judas betraying Jesus on Wednesday. The bold words are the parts I had to fill in with the boxes because the boxes were a bit too big to fit. Here is the picture:

For the last one, I had to get key words from the texts from the previous slides and put them into a table that shows their meaning. In another column of that table, we had to use that word in a sentence that showed it’s meaning well enough to be able to understand the meaning of the word I was trying to define. Here is that last picture for this post:

Have you ever done any word puzzles like these ones?

This year, I became a year 7. Being a year 7 meant that there was harder work. One of those tasks was the Writing Workbook. We have had three Writing Workbooks so far, and their subjects are sentence structure, punctuation and language features (E.g. similes, metaphors and hyperboles).

We did tasks like correctly punctuating sentences, making up similes, adding to sentences and much more. I spent a lot of time working on them and I am very proud of them. What is shown here is a sentence expansion task in which we had to add to the sentence using three of the five W’s.

This is only one of the many slides that I had completed in the three workbooks and I was happy at the work that I had done.

Have you ever done anything similar to the Writing Workbook tasks that I did?

On Wednesday of Week 10, Term 3, Hamish Kerr visited our school. For people that don’t know who Hamish Kerr is, Hamish Kerr is an Olympian that won a gold medal in high jump. He jumped 2.36 meters! That’s taller than most of the people reading this right now! Hamish Kerr is very tall. From what I heard from other people, he’s about 6’6! That’s got to explain why he could jump 2.36 meters! He also let us actually touch his gold medal! Approximately a month previous, 2 Olympians came to our school and let us touch their silver and bronze medals. There was a woman who had won a medal in swimming, and the other person, I don’t know but it’s still very impressive. That means that we had touched a gold, silver and bronze medals! Isn’t that cool?

Did you see Hamish Kerr on TV in the Olympics?

On Tuesday 20th of August, Seussical The Musical performed at our school. Now, I bet that you’re wondering, ‘what is Seussical the Musical?’ or something like that, and I’m going to answer that question. Seussical The Musical is a performance that is for all ages, and as you can guess, it is based on some of Doctor Seuss’s stories. As far as I know, the ones that it is based on is the Lorax (the background was set in the Lorax), Horton Hears a Who!, Horton Hatches the Egg and Cat in the Hat. It is about an elephant called Horton that finds a dust speck with an entire planet of atom-sized people on it. He also gets left with an egg laid by someone else, and he has to take care of it until it hatches. It is performed by roughly 30 people, and is arranged by NASDA (National Academy of Singing and Dramatic Art).

This week, I made a Canva brochure on how to keep your Chromebook safe and other tips on how to use it. I hope you can use this information to keep your own device safe. Here are the 2 pages of the brochure that I made. I really hope that you like it. Here it is.

Have you ever made a brochure using a site? If so, which site did you use to make it?

The Olympics are a very exciting and climatic event where almost all of the countries’ representatives gather up in one country and compete for gold, silver and bronze medals. The Olympics go back around 1,500 years ago when it was founded in Olympia (hence the name) and kept going every 4 years from then. Olympia has also had something else named after it – Mount Olympus. That is where all of the gods live in Greek mythology. The Olympics are very famous, known worldwide and enjoyed by people all over the globe. To even get a place in the Olympics is a very impressive feat to have reached because it means that the country that you represent trusts you completely, physically and mentally, let alone get a place in one of the sports. To get a place in even one of the sports means that you are one of the best of the best in that sport in the entire world. That is very impressive and hard to do.

Have you ever seen someone’s emotions as they won a medal? if so, what was the emotion and if you remember, what was the name of that person?

This week in PBL I did a project on Pollution in Minecraft.

What did you know about deforestation and climate change before using Minecraft? I knew that it was bad because trees recycle carbon dioxide but they are being cut down to produce more carbon dioxide which is bad for our planet.

Have you discovered anything new about deforestation and climate change? I have discovered that we can make renewable sources of energy by using solar panels and electric windmills to produce energy.

How do you think deforestation affects you? It affects me because it makes me angry that people are polluting the earth without thinking about the consequences.

What can humans do to help the problem? They can use different things to make into energy like the sun’s energy with solar panels and windmills.

Have you ever done a project on climate change and pollution?