July 15-21

Organizational Skills

            As I usually do, I spread out my work over this week so that I would have more than enough time to do the work I wanted to get done without feeling stressed. Due to the fact that I was back home in Indonesia, I had more freedom to do as I pleased, so I made sure that my PP folder was organized, and bought some plastic sleeves so I would not lose any of the papers I would accumulate over the school year.

Communication

            I got a lot of feedback from my dad this week about which environmental issue I should address on each page of my calendar and how to get information about that particular topic, be it a person he knew, a place he had heard about, or a website. We made a document with a list of possible topics I could use; a partial screen shot is below. In addition, my dad took me to a place near where he works in which people can plant mangrove trees. This would be quite beneficial to me for my “Tree Planting” calendar page, even though we were hoping that we could actually plant a mangrove tree (the supervisor had not arrived yet). We spoke with a worker there who showed us around and gave us some information about the mangroves and how they were good for the environment and the animals that live around there. My notes are in my notebook. A picture of me with the man we spoke with is under the screen clipping of the calendar ideas.

Information Literacy

            I learned that feedback from others is quite valuable in thinking of ideas for my calendar, and that good concepts for each topic require a lot of exertion to pursue and make into great ideas. I also learned that knowing and interacting with the right people with the right contacts can help greatly in the search for people to interview about certain environmental issues. In addition, going to various companies, organizations, or other places in which people could volunteer relevant information has proven to be quite helpful for my project as I will need to gather as much information as possible to be able to write a paragraph or two about each topic in my calendar. Furthermore, because I remembered someone saying something about The Body Shop being environmentally friendly, I found their website and read some things about how they are protecting the planet. What they are doing gave me some ideas about what I should write in the calendar about conserving the earth’s resources, minimizing waste, and more. Likewise, I learned from my mistakes.