Category: Grade 7

Exploring Twitter: Hashtags And Organisations

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For this assignment, we’re exploring twitter to find out different ways and organizations to help out our organism.

Here are some hashtags that are connected to Polar Bears on twitter:

KAS Hashtags:

– #KASendangered
This hashtag is fairly broad and is used by all the 7th graders to share their information on their endangered species. We’re able to reach the whole 7th grade through this hashtag.
– #KASeaPolar
This hashtag is for everyone who has polar animals to connect with each other and mutually share ideas and with each other. Using this hashtag, we’re able to communicate information and connect to other 7th graders who are also researching about polar animals/polar habitats.

Twitter hashtags:

– #endangeredspecies
This hashtag is important and useful because it’s not only used by people in KAS, but official organizations and scientists who like the spread word of the latest news/findings through this hashtag.

– #polarbear
Using #polarbear on twitter, you will see that in addition to lots of graphs and data on climate change, cute little pictures of polar bears also show up in the hashtag. The hashtag is frequently used by a wide variety of different people, including scientists who talk about global climate change or declining sea ice extents, but also regular people who are interested in preserving the species. Through this hashtag, you will be able to reach out towards a lot of different users who want to help conserve the species.

– #globalwarming
This hashtag is useful for a lot of species, especially the polar bear because it is such a big problem that’s affecting the world. It mainly affects species that have their habitats set in ice or oceans, (like the polar bear) but it indirectly affects many other species as well. In this hashtag, you can find out more about how global warming is damaging their habitats.

– #conservation
The conservation hashtag provides a lot of helpful tips and information on what you can do to help a species.

 

Organizations on Twitter:
National Geographic: National Geographic has a lot of new, up to date information on the latest news in science. Including news stories on conservation efforts and declining species.

WWF: The World Wide Fund for Nature, is a dedicated organization that focuses on protecting habitats and different species. They communicate their information out to the public in a fun way that attracts the average readers’ attention and provokes them to help.

Animal Protection: The Animal Protection twitter page tweets and retweets “highlights” or the most intriging animal stories from all different articles.

A Solution for the Conservation of Polar Bears

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Conservation of polar bears is something that needs to be done; not only for their survival, but for the survival of our planet. The global warming that is melting their habitat has been mostly caused by the carelessness of humans, and we aren’t doing anything to help. Strangely enough, going vegetarian might help out polar bears a lot more than we might think. Worldwide meat production actually emits more greenhouse gasses than global transportation does. Maybe it’s time to go vegetarian…remember, you are the problem, but you are also the solution.

Citation: S.A. (2009, March). How meat contributes to global warming. Retrieved May 23, 2013 from http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/env-howmeat.html

Change in Polar Bear Populations

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The polar bear is being endangered by the actions of humans and global warming. Polar bears were actually the first vertebrate species to be put on the list by the U.S. Endangered Species Act as threatened by extinction, mostly due to global warming. The listing occurred in 2008 because of ongoing habitat loss for polar bears. The same arctic sea ice in which they live and depend on to hunt their prey, which is almost exclusively seals.

The rising temperatures in the world and the world’s oceans are resulting in the sea ice to disappear for longer and longer periods of time during the summer, which leaves polar bears with fewer amounts of time to hunt. This is a big problem worldwide and has caused the Endangered Species Act to list polar bears as threatened everywhere in the world. Polar bears can only survive in areas where the oceans are able to freeze, which allows them to hunt seals who are living under and on the frozen polar ice caps.<br>

Orbiting satellites around the Earth have been able to capture the seasonal extent of sea ice since 1979, and the results are very bad in terms of the future of the polar bears. The minimum extent that the sea ice occurs in is around mid-September and during these months, new records lows being set for this minimum is now a regular event. The trend over the last couple of years has been for the last summer sea ice in the Arctic occur farther and farther from shore, requiring polar bears to swim increasingly long distances in order to reach the ice. Even worse, the remaining sea ice is over deep and unproductive waters that have less prey for the polar bears.

In the Hudson Bay, polar bears are now forced to spend their summer months on shore when the ice has melted and there is no ice platform for them to hunt seals. Resulting in the polar bears having to fast for longer and longer months. Fortunately, Hudson Bay polar bears have somehow been able to catch enough seals during the winter months to satisfy them during the period that they’re on-shore. However, this situation is changing fast because of climate change. Now, the ice is melting earlier than usual and forming up later, which leaves an ever-shorter period for polar bears to hunt. The Hudson Bay polar bears are now skinnier, have fewer cubs, the cubs they do have don’t normally even survive to adulthood, and the interval of time between each successful litters is increasing. Male bears are even starting to eat cubs.

What is seen in Hudson Bay is beginning to occur now in northern populations. This pattern is especially occurring on the North Coast of Alaska but appears to be the problem worldwide. The increasing gap between open water and the shore is creating longer swims for polar bears. During this long swim, both cubs and adult bears have suffered and died. Also, development in ocean floor exploration and oil extraction in open waters that were previously sealed by frozen ice is growing. This brings people, disturbance, and potentially disastrous oil spills to the arctic polar bear habitat.

However, polar bear populations aren’t anything to be worried about right now. Instead, we should be worried about polar bear populations in the future, because at the rate that we are warming our globe, polar bears are surely soon to be extinct. We know that polar bear populations are declining, it’s just a matter of what rate they disappear at that’s up to us.

Polar bears need our help and protection to ensure a future for their species. The best way you can help polar bears is by reducing your carbon emissions to help control global warming.
Here is a graph that shows the change in polar bear populations throughout time as they were endangered from declining sea ice before some conservation efforts were shown. Polar bear populations still continue to drop due to the ignorance of humans even though we already know this to be a worldwide problem. Poor tracking of the Polar Bears in the Arctic has also lead to somewhat inaccurate assumptions of the population levels, however, polar bears are projected to decrease 30% by 2050.

Citation: (February, 14, 2014). Polar bear population now officially 13,071-24,238 says IUCN polar bear specialist group. Retrieved May 22, 2017 from https://polarbearscience.com/2014/02/14/polar-bear-population-now-officially-13071-24238-says-iucn-polar-bear-specialist-group/

せんせいへのてがみ

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ちかこせんせいへ
おげんきですか。

きのう、７：００におきました。ええと、あさごはんをたべませでした。あ〜いいえ、あさごはんをたべました。おいしいサンードイチをたべました。

７：２０にがっこうへいきました。かっこうは８：００から３：００までです。かっこうのクラスはつまらないです、とくににほんごのクラス。でも、ぜんぶんのクラスはとてもかんたんでときどきたのしいです。

９：５０ににほんごのクラスへいきました。きのうのにほんごのクラスはちょっとおもしろかったです。かようびのにほんごのクラスはもくようびのよりよかったです。

それから、おいしくてきれいなひるごはんがありました。あなたはひるごはんがすきですか。

さようなら、
ポーラより

267

Dystopia: A Perfect Society?

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This is a post for our Language Arts unit on dystopian societies and our version of utopia.

These are my TIEA paragraphs of the novel I read, Insignia, and a short dystopian novel,
The Pedestrian.

These are pictures of the map of my perfect society, and its flag, money, and uniforms.

 

Here are the rules as to how my society functions, and what you can expect to see in it:

These are the pictures that I took of my annotation on the book Insignia.

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Here is my screencast on the theoretically perfect society, or at least what a perfect society is to me. However, this society obviously is not perfect because everyone has their own idea of perfect, and my idea of perfect is not necessarily everyone’s idea of perfect.

Medieval Europe Unit Reflection

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What did you do in this unit? In this unit, we went through Medieval Europe and the illnesses, complications, and change they went through in order to flourish as a stable society in the end. We did a lot of different activities and games in order for us to expand our knowledge of the fall of the Roman empire (and what came after it) and Medieval Europe. Some activities we did include:

  • Different feudal levels (Level 1, Level 2, etc.): In the different levels, we had a general base of several questions that we had to answer for each level. We started off every level by doing the question activities in our notebooks and from the questions, we were able to gain most of our understanding of the chapter. We would do other activities in class at the same time that reinforced our knowledge of the chapter and questions. For example, to learn more about the Roman Catholic church, we made stained glass windows in class. This was supposed to help us understand more about the cathedrals and the stained glass windows they had because our stained glass windows were supposed to tell a story from the bible, like the church’s had. Another thing we did to support our reading from the text was making our coat of arms. The coat of arms was a small drawing that we did at the beginning of the unit, and we used it to mark where we were in the levels throughout the unit. It helped us learn more about Medieval Europe and the unit because instead of just having a marker with our names on it, we made a coat of arms that represented us in some way, like what people in medieval Europe had usually on their flags or shields to represent their countries. Basically everything that we did in this unit had some unique relation to what we were learning, even if we didn’t realise it at first. 
  • Board games: From the board games, we had to answer questions about all throughout the unit which was really helpful in refreshing our memory and discovering fun facts about the the unit. It really exposed if we really knew the information about the unit or if we’d just forgotten everything. The board game was just a really nice reminder of everything we learned in whole unit. It was also able to put the information in a fun format so it was probably easier for us to recieve the information in the form of a board game instead of just reading the textbook to check our knowledge. We were supposed to make a board game that was able to convey our knowledge of everything that we picked up throughout the unit. The board games made learning about the whole unit more fun, and I think a lot of students enjoyed playing each other’s games.

 

What did you learn in this unit? Make sure you include how Medieval Europe relates to the key concept of Time, Place and Space. In the unit, we had the key concept of time, place, and space. We were supposed to focus on this concept throughout the unit and figure out how it related to everything that we learned in the unit. I think throughout the unit, and throughout history, a main idea that’s constantly brought up, is the idea that events only occur because of the exact time, place, and space, it occured in. Things like past events shape the future because everything in history is somehow interconnected. Some things don’t happen unless some other event happens that triggers the problem or event in history. There are multiple examples alone just in this unit, take the fall of Rome for example. The fall of Rome occurred around the 330s CE, when the then emperor Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople. One of the causes of this was the lack of political stability in Europe at the time. Rome did not have a good way of transferring power during this time and that was the start of a lot of fights over power, eventually contributing to the fall of the western part of the Roman empire. If a system like Feudalism (which came right after the fall of Rome) had been around during these times, would the Roman empire have lasted? We’ll never know for sure, because feudalism was only invented after the fall of Rome because of the lack of political transfer of power. If Rome had never fallen and people weren’t desperate to find a good way to change power into the hands of another, would feudalism have been made? The time, place, and space that an event occurs in shapes the future of society and history.

 

What are some of the challenges you faced during this unit? How did you solve them? Some challenges I faced during the unit was the lack of time management. Since we had so many challenge assignments and required assignments, we had to make sure we were able to do all that we needed to while still doing a good job on our work which was probably by far the hardest part of the whole unit. It was hard to figure out if we needed to do a little bit more so that we were able to finish on time,  or if we could leave that part until tomorrow to finish. Being able to find a balance of having enough work while not going over or under was hard to do and I think in some ways, we still do struggle with balancing every assignment that we have to do. I tried to make sure I didn’t leave everything until the last moment by doing a little bit of work here and there throughout the week and setting due dates for myself, saying when I have to finish this part of the assignment or this question, etc. I guess this also ties in with how well I undertook the activities in the unit. I think I did okay with organizing my time to be able to finish the assignments on time. There’s always room for improvement and sometimes I might’ve had to stay up late to finish assignments, but I was always able to do enough beforehand to finish on the due date. I should’ve probably done a better job at doing my work, not just at the last minute, but I really thought it was part of the fun of doing the questions. Strangely enough, this was also my favorite part of the unit. I really enjoyed answering the questions in our notebooks because to me, it felt like I was able to truly understand the meaning of the text/chapters and I wasn’t just skimming over it like I usually do. Also by making us write everything out in our notebooks gave me less reason to procrastinate which I was greatful for since it’s a bad habit of mine. I could just sit down with the actual copy of the textbook and my notebook and work. Everything that we needed to know was just in our textbook, and there was really no reason to search things up on the internet. The words in the textbook took much more meaning when I had the time to really think about them in order to answer the questions. So, answering questions was my favorite part of the unit because I felt like I could really understand the text and I enjoyed the moment of clarity and satisfaction that came with finally seeing how 2 events came together or were related.

 

What changes would you make to this unit? I wouldn’t change much about this unit, it was done well and overall, it was really fun. The activities and questions came together to form a strangely nice mix of learning and appreciating the unit through games. I think however, we could talk about the questions more and the chapter more in class to understand the unit better because I’m still kind of blurry on specific some parts of the unit (mostly due to my less than subpar geographical knowledge, but that’s besides the point). We did talk about the chapters we read a lot in class, and I think that was why we were able to do so well. Sometimes you can’t just read from the textbook and you have to actually have a discussion in class in order to retain the information, so overall, I think I really wouldn’t change anything about this unit.