November 4-10

Organizational Skills

            This week I mainly focused on taking the photos for my calendar pages. If I am not wrong, I believe I have seven so far: ecological balance maintenance, wildlife conservation, energy conservation, renewable geothermal energy sources, reducing one’s carbon footprint, biodegradable plastics, and plant conservation.

Wildlife Conservation

Plant Conservation

Ecological Balance Maintenance

Biodegradable Plastics

Reducing One's Carbon Footprint

Energy Conservation

Geothermal Renewable Energy Sources

            I have not touched up any of them except for the energy conservation one (the wreath ornament on a Christmas tree with Christmas lights in the background) and the ecological balance maintenance one (the three howling wolves).

Communication

            I communicated with some friends this week about the Personal Project: how much work it actually was as we did not expect there to be this much work. I also talked to my sister about possible title page layouts, but I was not able to actually get to creating a title page for my calendar. She drew a picture of a possible layout, and I redrew it in a neater way inside my notebook. It is shown below.

Information Literacy

         I learned that even if one plans to do something (such as in my case, take a photo of something to use for a calendar page), it will not necessarily work out. Originally, my family and I had gone to a fish hatchery in Yellowstone to get pictures for my Ecological Balance Maintenance calendar page, but I was not able to get any good pictures of the fish or their eggs because there was constantly a glare from the sunlight. Plus, the pools that they were in did not look too good either due to a lot of algae and other aquatic plants residing at the bottom, making the water look dirty. It was also difficult to take the picture about the carbon footprint, because I had to dip my foot in black paint in order to create the footprint. I had to make sure the footprint was in the right place on the newspaper, and had to find a newspaper article that was relevant to the environment, because I initially wanted to take a picture of a newspaper headline with the footprint in the background. Even though I took multiple pictures from various angles, none of them came out well, so I resorted to taking a close-up picture of the “carbon” footprint. This came out better than the other pictures, so I will use that. I am glad that I have already taken more than half of the pictures I need for the calendar; I am planning to take the rest of the pictures in the next few weeks or so, and also during the Christmas break in December.