Nicholas' Learning

The most interesting book I read in term two was a book called Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which was basically six loosely related stories set in different time periods. Basically the book is told like a Russian nesting doll where five of the story are left hanging halfway at a cliffhanger, then the six story is told in full and then the other five stories are continued in reverse order they were told in, so 1,2,3,4,5,6,5,4,3,2,1. Each story has some kind of trace (for example a document or statue) that came from the previous story. The first story is called The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing which is about some kind of lawyer who is at sea. The story begins in 1850 in the Chatham Islands. He finds a Moriori stowaway in his cabin while travelling and also catches a parasite. The second story is called Letters from Zedelghem. Told in form of letters from a musician to their lover Rufus Sixsmith in 1931. They are hired to become an Amanuensis for a famous composer Vyvyan Ayrs (wh...

For my excellence badge I decided to create my own challenge which was to create a poster about something to do in the classroom. At first I decided to do it about BYOD use but then I decided on how to get out of the pit, just a redesigned version of Mr Ladbrook's poster . I made two versions of the poster because I couldn't decide which was best. For the poster I used photoshop.

WALT: I can successfully research a current event. Here is a link to our online modelling book for this unit of learning. The National Standard that I have been aiming for during this unit of learning is: Year 9/10: I can read in different ways to find and/or understand information that that is not immediately easy to access or is not organised in familiar ways. Each week we have read a short text about a current event/ topic. We then formed questions based on what we had read.  After this we researched the answers to our questions and finally we gave our opinions on what we had found out. Here is some evidence of my learning. Describe Map One - Microbeads Describe map Two - Climate Change My Next Step is to continue to  apply the reading and  research skills that I have learned in a variety of other areas.

For Music this term, three things I learnt were: 1. That the biggest elements of hip hop are: Rap, Dance, Beat boxing, DJ 2. That Split Enz is a New Zealand Band 3. That "Why does love do this to me" was a New Zealand single. Something I found challenging was... trying to do the rap very very fast because you quickly ran out of breath.

Technology This week in home economics we looked at how sugar was made and the different types of sugar and their uses. As a tester, we made some basic cookies to test them so each group used different sugars to see the difference. The sugars were: Caster sugar, Icing Sugar, Brown sugar, Raw sugar and granulated sugar. My group got caster sugar which was the original sugar used in the recipe. After we made our cookies we all shared our different cookies and tried them all. Then we got our books out and recorded what each tasted like. After that we watched even more videos about the different uses of sugar and then had to record what sugar did to baking. I think the care value I used was active thinking because we had to record and remember the different tastes and sugars. A leadership trait I used was also active thinking, for the exact same reason.