This semester in my BioFitness class we had has make a ‘wellness plan,' where we had to pick three aspects of wellness to focus on and make a plan on how we were going to carry out with them, hence the name ‘wellness plan’. Among other things I chose ‘stress management’, and the reason I’m choosing to talk about this one, is because stress management is the main one that I wanted to focus on this year. I’ve always been an easily stressed person, but coming to high school has only made it worse. I actually read an article on Health Harvard that says when too much stress is provoked it can lead to health problems, such as a low immune system, increasing susceptibility to illnesses, but also high blood pressure - a major risk factor for heart disease. To make sure I never reach a point where my stress is causing me major health problems I have developed my own coping methods. Almost always the root of my stress is caused when I feel that I have too much to handle, so when I start to feel overwhelmed I run through my head and try to find the root of my stress and from there I separate whats out of my control and what is in my control and I what I am capable of doing. From there I prioritize what needs to get done. I know that in the school years to come they will get harder, and that my stress will never actually go away or “disappear”, however knowing this basic coping method, and trying new ones every week (like exercising, diaphragmatic breathing) will help me tackle my stress and know how to handle a stressful situation when it arises. In fact websites like Health Harvard have articles saying that a little stress is good, it can give me the motivation I need to finish a project or this article for example on time, and invokes the fight or flight response, however I don’t want it to get to the point where stress is having a serious effect on my health. Here is a poster I made in my BioFit class that, about an easy FREE way of coping with stress, for more information please visit the website at the bottom.
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Recently my BioFitness class did a project on invasive species, and my team chose English Ivy, something that is very common and we see everyday, but is very deadly and a threat to our ecosystems. For more information on English Ivy, and how it is a threat, what to do about it, and overall what my team learned, please visit our website!
http://englishivy-informative.weebly.com/ I’m going to be honest, I don’t get enough physical movement as I should, and at first I was going to do walking, since one, I walk a lot, and two live in a area of town where it’s very easy for me to walk to many places, such as downtown.
But I decided to do hiking since it’s something I do often enough with family or friends, it’s something I like and I enjoy being outside. Since I was young we have gone hiking around the Bay Area, such as places like Mt Tam, but there has been times where I have been backpacking up east in California by Cache Creek. Hiking is not only a great workout for me personally, but also when I’m hiking my head is clearer, and I forget my stresses. True when hiking depending on where I am, I can still hear the sound of cars, but it’s still nice and refreshing be surrounded by nature, and away from the city. I also feel a sense of accomplishment after finishing my hike since most of the time, the result is a breathtaking view of a river or mountain, etc. It really all depends on where your hiking. This is my first post for our new BioFitness semester, hiking is definitely something I see myself doing in the future, in fact I’m going hiking next weekend. Thank you for reading. Here is me and my teammates finale artwork for our Biology class! If you have read my previous posts about this particular project you will know that the main focus of the art-piece ( the wave being that that the man topic of the project is OCEANS ) is created from various pieces of trash mostly, plastic, me and my teammate have collected The back round, which is supposed to represent a cloudy grey sky, was made from newspaper we found in the trash. Me and my team mate have not yet decided what we will do with the artpiece, maybe one of us will take it home, but for right now it's still up in the air. Here is a quick diagram titled " 6 Degrees of Seperation" about only some of the harm plastic pollution can do, and one way it can be caused. Source:Trash Diagram One of the questions we were asked was, did your audience understand the intended content of your artwork?
But first let me give a brief overview of what our intended content was with this art-piece. One was to let our audience know how much plastic we use and recycle in a day, which according to many websites is 4.5 pounds a day which adds up to 223 million tons a YEAR. And as you see above in the diagram it harms the ocean in many ways not just marine animals mistaking them for food. We would point this out along with mentioning it really only took a day to find all the trash we needed to do our artwork. We also hope to maybe inspire people, not only to cut down on plastic, but to reuse like we did instead of just chucking it into the trash, since we know plastic is very hard to recycle. Audience means different things for different people in this case since we have yet to have our Oceanography presentations, so I will be counting my classmates and my Weebly as an "audience." Although I can't be sure with Weebly since I know many people don't visit mine, I have explained clearly in my blog posts -and shown picture of my art-piece - of what both I and my teammate want the audience to take away. With my classmates I have gotten positive feedback, and with a little explaining of the art piece the seem to put the pieces together on what we are trying to convey, and even offer helpful feedback. Goodbye and thank you for reading my final benchmark for my Oceanography project! So big change of plans, my project was thrown away along with the materials me and my teammate were using which of course was very unexpected. I don’t know if it was mistaken, along with the materials as trash-being that the materials literally were trash- but I do know that meant that I or me and my teammate had to restart our art piece. This was frustrating for a number of reasons, one it now puts me and my teammate behind, and two, though the art piece was not finished it was still very frustrating to watch something you spent hours working on being thrown away. It was however helpful in the fact once I restarted I had a clearer vision of what I wanted to do, and what the challenges were going to be, and way me and my teammate could deal with them One of the challenges faced was the sea foam on the waves. If you guys remember from my previous benchmark post I said that my teammate and I were recreating the painting ‘ the Great Wave of Kanagawa’ using plastic. The process is fairly simple, we started by gathering our materials,which was basically my teammate and I looking through both the trash and recycling for blue and white mediums-which took us less than an HOUR to collect. Our next step was to outline the basic shapes of the waves, nothing fancy, on our poster board, and then we just begin the long job cutting the materials with scissors and gluing them down,within the lines of the waves. This really only started to prove difficult when a couple of things happened- besides our poster being thrown out. Like I mentioned above in a previous paragraph when I came to the foam part I had a hard time choosing what I wanted to do with the foam part of the wave. I know this probably sounds ridiculous, and wasn’t a huge challenge so it was simply fixed by discussing the issue with my teammate. In the end as you will see in one of the photos we recreated the foam using rice crispy treat wrappers. Something that was weird, but still a challenge for ME personally was I kept trying to make the art piece look exactly like the painting we were recreating, which was probably why I had the first challenge because I kept trying to make the foam look like the paintings. I was getting frustrated that the waves weren’t looking the same , which since the artist and I both used different mediums and both have different styles it would be impossible for our work to look exactly the same. So in a way us having to start the piece over was good in the fact that it allowed me to step outside myself and look at the art, and gave us the opportunity to improve our artwork. We are almost finished with our art piece and as before what we are hoping the audience takes away a couple things from our work. We hope to make them realize our over consumption of trash, because fun fact each individual person throws away four pounds of trash a day. That’s a LOT especially if you multiply that by the number of people there is on the planet, and a reason why our art piece is good since we know plastic is difficult to recycle so this is one way to reuse it, that could possibly inspire the audience. We will mention this with our art piece including how long it took for us to collect the trash, and also give some tips on what the audience can do to reduce pollution. This would connect to one of my standards I chose which is “humans relationships with an ecosystems” the ecosystem being the ocean and the human relationships being the pollution we cause and ways we can reduce it. The actual trash/pollution part relates to my second standard “ecosystems”, the pollution causing a slight change in the oceans ecosystems and all its interacting organisms, that results in huge changes. Thank you for reading this and one final thing I would like to mention is my teammate and I said that we would only use plastic wrappers,since then we have broaden our horizons and are using other types of trash. Hey y'all my project I'm doing pollution. My two standards I'm focusing on are ecosystems and human relationships with ecosystems.
Ecosystems A 'solid' definition of an ecosystem is "a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment." For me I will be looking at the interaction between the different types of ocean pollution-although I'll mainly focus on plastic pollution- and the creatures and people, both can be considered the organisms, who depend on the physical environment which in this case is the ocean. Pollution has a huge effect on the ecosystem of our oceans, and although many people might not even think twice about it, the pollution, trash, and garbage we create has a HUGE chain reaction on the ocean. So one tiny change in the oceans ecosystems, can lead to changes in all of its other things. For example, plastic pollution can upset the food chain, it can effect the tiniest organisms such as plankton which are poisoned due to plastic pollution. This can cause problems for larger animals such as fish, who depend on them as food. Not even that, people who EAT the fish, who have eaten the poisoned plankton, now have ingested plastic themselves. Human Relationships with Ecosystems Just like I mentioned in the paragraph above the changes pollution causes in the oceans ecosystems can have an effect on human life, people are eating the plastic that the fish themselves have ingested, but also something that I didn't mention above was the lost of resources in the ocean that people might depend on. But I also will be focusing on something more positive, like solutions we as people can do to prevent the amount of pollution we create. A way that is very basic, is for people to start using reusable shopping bags. Grocery stores can start a policy that you can only use reusable shopping bags-which as annoying as this sounds will benefit the ocean, which benefits us, and in a way becomes its own mini ecosystem. This is some information about my two subtopics thank you for reading! Sources: http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/ http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ Art piece: Me and my teammate are envisioning of recreating the art piece ‘ The Great Wave of Kanagawa’. Since once of the requirements is that we can’t do any type of traditional style of art such as drawing or painting, my teammate and I have decided to recreate the painting using plastic wrappers. The timeline of creating the piece shouldn’t take long, I just need to get a poster board, I could easily find one at school, and outline the waves. What we mainly have to do is-as weird as this sounds- is the process of collecting as many white,and dark and light blue wrappers. What We Hope the Audience Will Take Away : Plastic is a really big cause of pollution- plastic breaks down in the ocean and is ingested by seabirds, and humans will as well be affected by the toxins- and since plastic can be so difficult to recycle (although possible always check if it is ) this would be a great way to reuse it. To recreate the waves, instead of using paints or pencils we will use the wrappers and glue them down into the outline drawn on the poster board. I also want to keep some type of chart, diagram, chart, whichever, to show how little (hopefully ) it took for us to collect that much plastic to show our everyday consumption of it, and I really do hope people will take this into account, and limit their reduce their use of plastic, since not only is it a place that humans and creatures depend on, but the ocean is a place I also love. This is still being decided, it depends on our time, but we have thought of also collecting some type ofblack wrappers or plastic to represent an oil spill, another huge cause of pollution, in our art-piece. We will present this during our project presentation explain our thought process behind it , in hope to really push peoples thinking on pollution. TOPIC:
My Biology class is starting our new project, Oceanography. Hence the title of the project, each team was given a topic having to do with the ocean ranging from human health, art, chemistry, and pollution which my team was assigned. Which I’m super excited to be learning about. Cause/How to Prevent Pollution: The subtopics I chose concerning pollution was ‘what are the types of pollution,' - from oil spills, sewage, toxic chemicals and other sources-and’ how can we prevent it on a large and small scale.’ I also will touch briefly on how pollution in our oceans affects the people and creatures that depend on them. The effect of pollution is a lot larger than most people might think. Pollution can disrupt the food chain by damaging even the smallest of sea creatures, which might seem insignificant, but are really essential to maintaining a balanced and healthy ocean. Pollution also damages the well being of people who depend on it on the ocean and the food provided by the ocean, such as the chemicals from the fish we eat can be transmitted into us, and the overall health of the ocean. Some ways each one of us could easily prevent the amount of pollution, that don't require the stricter government regulations on industry and manufacturing renewable energy sources so off-shore drilling no longer needed, is to recycle, reduce the consumption of plastic, use less electricity, or volunteer at one of your local beaches cleanups. What I want People to Realize/Take Away: For me, I want my presentation, blog posts, art piece(s) or whatever else I do that concerns this project, is to have people realize that pollution does have a huge effect on our oceans, and the people and creatures that depend on them. Not only that, but pollution doesn’t have to be stopped by the government, but you start helping by doing simple things such as helping volunteer for a beach cleanup, or even just recycling. Campaign. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2016, from http://oceana.org/our-campaigns/stop_ocean_pollution/campaign Pollution Prevention - Save Our Shores. (n.d.). Retrieved October 11, 2016, fromhttp://saveourshores.org/what-we-do/pollution-prevention/ Architecture, B. B. (n.d.). Solutions for Ocean Pollution. Retrieved October 11, 2016, fromhttp://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/Solutions_for_Ocean_Pollution |
AuthorHey guys! I don't know how many of you are reading this since this isn't a tinder bio, but I'm Isabel and the main purpose of this blog is for school. Its a portfolio I'm going to use to document my four years of high school-maybe even after! Archives
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