CAS

June 9, 2020 I have continued the project towards having functioning planter boxes, I have acquired the materials and am working on assembling the boxes. It has been taking much longer to do than I had previously thought it would, partially due to my own mistakes but partly due to the lack of help from my siblings. I have completely taken over the entire construction part of this project which would be nice if there wasn’t so much that needed to be done to put the boxes together. It has genuinely been quite physically draining and I can say without a doubt that this falls under the category of activity. “Physical exertion contributing to a healthy lifestyle” I’m making a garden so we can have fresh fruits and vegetables. I can’t think of anything that fits that description more than this. This also completes learning outcome 4 “Show Commitment to and perseverance in a fieldwork experience.” This has been an ongoing project and will require continued work until it is finally seen throug...

  May 24th, 2020  During this extra time at home my little sister and I have realized some things about our house that we are really not a huge fan of and things that we wanted to improve. One of the biggest things that we realized our house was missing out on was the opportunity to have a large garden. We compiled a list of materials to make planter boxes and ended up planning to make 5 planter boxes that were 8ft by 3 ft that we would make, fill with dirt, and plant assorted things in. As of right now we only have the plans for them but we have spent a lot of time deciding on materials and how we would construct them and what will go in them. We went with a wood frame with corrugated metal sides for the structure of the boxes with a thin wood trip at the top for purely aesthetic purposes. This fulfills learning outcome 3 as I initiated and planned this learning experience and got to work devising plans for it. This falls under Creativity as we had to use creativity when crea...

  April 9, 2020 Well, we’ve been at home for almost 3 extra weeks now and it doesn’t look like things are going to return to normal all that quickly. Lovely. In my extra time at home, I have started going on walks with my mom in the morning. It is something that I find enjoyable to do and Is good for me. We wake up around 7:30, walk around the neighborhood, about 1.5 miles and come home, shower, have breakfast, and start our days. This has been a nice consistent thing in my life which has quickly become full of a lot of uncertainty. It was a nice opportunity to actually have this new time to exercise, I believe that this fulfills learning outcome 1 as I have identified my own strengths and weaknesses and worked towards growth by exercising. 

  March 23, 2020 Creativity  Our school has many different A-Term courses that people can choose from. I opted to be a part of “Exploring Historical, Political, and Geographic Landmarks in London, England” where we would travel to London and do a lot of interesting things there. However, due to COVID 19, we had to cancel the trip. This put me and the other 11 students in it in a rather difficult situation. We had around a week and a half to plan an entire 2 week A-Term course. In this week and a half, we went through tons of ideas ranging from a trip to New Orleans, a leatherworking/boot making A-Term, a photography A-term, and a trip to Austin to explore the art and music scene there. Little did we know that the work that we were doing was not going to matter at all. When we got off of school for spring break, we didn’t return to in-person school and we switched to online, a change which will probably stay for the rest of the year. Even though all of it ended up being for not...

February 13, 2020 Recently I started running again and I started off with a shaky start. You see, I decided that it would be a good idea to go from a few months of no running, to a 4 mile run. I started off fairly strong and was able to keep breathing well and keep up a good pace for the first mile. Things went pretty downhill after mile 2. I’ve learned that I really need to improve my stamina. I’m not too slow but I can't keep running for very long. I am glad that I have started getting into this again and I hope to lose some weight because I’m not too satisfied with my current physical condition. I will try to start going on weekly (at the least) runs and we’ll see where this goes in the future. I believe that I accomplished Learning Outcome 1 (Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth.) during this as I have realized how difficult it is to start running again and so I don’t want to have to restart from a dead stop again so I will try to keep these runs going. I think...

January 16, 2020 Day 8 Today unfortunately is my last day :( I hope that today goes well so that I don’t leave them on a bad note. By now the day is over and I worked with them on money and I was surprised at how many of them there were that didn’t know the names of the coins. I played the same game with them as yesterday. (Telling them to add up to $1.50 and having them show me different ways to do it) and I had all the classics from yesterday 6 quarters, 15 dimes, 150 pennies, 3 half dollars, 2 half dollars and 2 quarters. I had a bunch of struggles with them again today with them remembering which coin was which. I eventually came up with “the smallest coin has the smallest name” unfortunately that one wasn't super clear as many of the kids thought that I meant smallest value. And even more unfortunately I had such a hard time finding any tricks that the kids could use to remember the coins aside from the obvious one quarter is one quarter of a dollar. Unfortunately they di...

January 15, 2020 Day 7 Today was another arts day which was annoying since I only had until 9:15 to work with the kids. However even though I only had a small amount of time to work with them, I still was able to accomplish a lot of stuff. This morning I worked with Mia, Lilia, and Taylor on money. We started with remembering the names of the coins and how much each of them are worth. I then gave them an assortment of coins and had them name all of the coins and tell me how much money it was. Once they got good at that I moved on to flashcards that had coins on them (basically the same thing but they liked it better because they got to hold on to the flashcard when they got it correct.) After that we moved on to the final phase of their training and I went around the circle and had each person tell me a way to get $1.50. We started with Mia saying 6 quarters, then the next person said 2 half dollars and 2 quarters, then we got 15 dimes, 150 pennies 3 half dollars, and then Mia gave...