Category: Year

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“Element of Life”

It’s never been better to study something new, especially when it comes to chemistry. Carbon is basically the main focus of this round, but what is carbon? What makes Carbon so special that we focus on only carbon the whole seven weeks? Well, we didn’t actually spend the whole 7 weeks, because we only study stem every other week, which means we only studied about three weeks or so. Back to the topic, Carbon is everywhere, because 0.04% of the atmosphere is made out of Carbon. Carbon is known as the “element of life”, because all living things contain carbon in them. Besides just carbon, we studied hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide. Hydrocarbon is a compound combination of hydrogen and carbon only. Carbon needs to bond with four other elements around it to be a complete hydrocarbon. There are different prefix for different hydrocarbon, such as:

 

Meth: 4 hydrogens and 1 carbon

Eth: 6 hydrogens and 2 carbon

Prop: 8 hydrogens and 3 carbon

But: 10 hydrogens and 4 carbon

Pent: 12 hydrogens and 5 carbon

Hex: 14 hydrogens and 6 carbon

Hept: 16 hydrogens and 7 carbon

Oct: 18 hydrogens and 8 carbon

Non: 20 hydrogens and 9 carbon

Dec: 22 hydrogens and 10 carbon

 

Below shows some examples of hydrocarbon. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afterward we did a black snake experiment and wrote a lab report about the experiment. 

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Decimals

      

        In the middle of round 3, we got our new book, the 5B. We then started learning the first lesson of the book; decimals. Fraction and decimals obviously are related, because they are both used to count partial numbers, just that we sometimes prefer one over another, which is totally fine. We first learned the basic terminology and just required things that we need to know about decimals before learning how to do operations between decimals and decimals or decimals and whole numbers. Afterwards, we studied on how to convert between fractions and decimals back and forth. Of course, we then do practices; mostly we have assignments with due dates on Khan Academy, a self-learning online tools that students and educators could use to help their learning. We already finished learning decimals and we’ll continue the next lesson next round.

 

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Khmer Literacy-Round 2

From bizdoctors.asia

A novel that is known all over Cambodia is now being introduced. Kolab Pailin or The Rose of Pailin is a novel written by a really famous author, Nhok Thaem. He has written many other books as well and this is one of the best novel he wrote. This novel is a very educational and could really relate to real life. Other than learning about Kolab Pailin, we also learned the history of Water Festival and Kathina. These are two famous ceremonies that are celebrated in Cambodia. The Water Festival is celebrated to remind us at time when our king defeated the enemy by water way, so we celebrated the ceremonies every year during November by having a boat race. Kathina is a celebration that is only celebrated in the Buddhism religion. We celebrated in the Vossa season, the rainy season. We usually go to pagodas and offer the monks different things, like sugar, tea, candles, clothes for the monks, etc… I find these lesson really helpful, because as a Cambodian citizen, we should know all about the history and what we do on the ceremonies.

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Another Lesson to be Introduced

As the new round starts, new lessons are being introduced. We mostly focused on area and perimeter of different polygons, like triangles and rectangles. Aside from learning new things, we were also given a lesson on code.org that is related to algebra. I found the lesson really helpful, as we are now introducing to algebra little by little. The code.org lesson is just something we could do outside of class, just for extra practice for algebra. On the last unit of the book, we learned about ratios and did some fun projects relating to budgeting, recipes and number of students and staffs in school. To make sure we understand the content, we did a lot of exercises that includes word problems; word problems are sometimes very tricky, but I really think word problems are the best, because they help me both with the math and the words usage with math. I found this round really interesting and excited and I’m even more excited for the new book, 5B.

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Chemical Bonding

As mentioned before, we are still focusing on physical science, but this time we look a little deeper into the periodic table and chemical bonding. We basically learned about who created and rearranged the periodic table, how the periodic table is formatted and we also learned about the elements in the periodic table. We didn’t focus on every single one of the element, but we focus on the important and common ones. Furthermore, we look closer into chemical bonding, which includes covalent bonding, ionic bonding and metallic bonding, which are related to electrons in the element. We study closely on each bonding and give examples on all of them to make sure that we are fully understood. Ck12 is a website, where we learn all of our contents from.

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English Literacy-Round 2

The second round of the year starts off with the study of social and environmental injustice; social injustice is basically about how people are treated unfairly, due to their race, origins, religions, etc… Environmental injustice is quite related to social injustice, as it is about how the environment affect human life. As we are learning, we completed a hyperdoc about minority groups in Connecticut and how the power plants affect them, since most of the power plants in the state are located near the minority groups territory. Besides that we are currently focusing on writing argumentative essays. As a warm up, we did something called Philosophical chair, where a topic or statement is given and students need to choose to agree or disagree and they will debate and give turns respectfully. Before writing the argumentative essay, we also learn tips and skills to write an argumentative essay. That includes devil advocate, writing thesis statement, choosing evidence, integrating source and more.

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Take Mistakes as Your Lesson, Not Your Failure

Learning about Khmer traditional food is something that I’m proud of as a Cambodian child. Our goals in this exploration are to gather people’s story about how Cambodian food has impacts on them and to bring back the forgotten food of Cambodia, as nowadays Cambodians tend to have fast foods rather than Cambodian food. After a few weeks of our exploration, we went on a trip to Siem Reap province to interview chefs, small shop owners and local food sellers to get their life’s story and how Cambodian food have influence them. Before we went on the trip, we were assigned into three teams, Journalism, Video and Photo team. I was part of the journalism team and it was a really great experience working as a journalist and I came to realize that being a journalist is like a storyteller. Journalists tell stories, not just reports. They might tell the same story, but in unique and different ways, that’s what I really love about journalists. They also could bring the readers the incident and cause the readers to feel differently about something. Click here to see one of my writing about a Cambodian steam pork bun seller at a local market in Siem Reap province. I am also managing the blog and customize the blog format. Managing a blog for the whole team is very new to me, but I really enjoy doing it and there are some mistakes and struggles, but we use our mistakes as an experience, not a failure. 

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Digital Storytelling-Multimedia

Digital storytelling and photography are taught in this round in Multimedia essential. We basically learned about the story structures that could be applied to any types of story/writing. I really think learning about the story structure is very helpful for us, as students, because we will write a lot of stories and this skill will be apply to the writing. Digital storytelling is telling stories through technology. Photography is one of the visual storytelling. There are also different kind of photos, like depth, frame, symmetry, etc… Besides just studying in class, we also did some scavenger hunts, where we go around the school campus and take varieties of photos.

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Creating a Mobile Theater-Round 1

This is the first exploration of my third year, which is called Tos Merl (*Khmer words, meaning,“Let’s watch”) Liger Community Traveling Theater. It is basically about building a community mobile theater. Last year I was in a similar exploration called Set Design, which is about preparing sets for a play, but this is a different kind of experience, since our goal is to make a mobile theater, but we also include the sets in the mobile theater. The reason why we do this is because it is more efficient and it could be used in various ways, meaning we could also use it for classrooms, presentations etc… I was assigned to be one of the two manager of the team, which is a totally new experience for me, since I’ve never been a manager before. After get a taste of it, I really like the job of managing, because this person helps the team a lot, interact with the team a lot, helps keep things organized, on task and keep them excited. Half way through our exploration, we went on a three days and two nights trip to Kampong Cham and Tbong Khmum, province located in the central of Cambodia. The main reason for us to go there is to interview people in the rural areas about their experiences with mobile theater or a play. We also filmed their answer, so that we could make a video and post it in Kickstarter, a website that we use to get donations, to buy the container truck, in order to redesign the truck into a mobile theater. On the other hand, we also performed an educational play to those people without our mobile theater, to introduce them to what is a play and what it looks like. It was a very fun experience for me and my teammates to interact with the villagers and get to know them more. This exploration is probably one of the biggest exploration this year, so we will continue this exploration in round 3 or later. I really enjoy working with my teammates and hope to collaborate with them in the future to finish our mobile theater.

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Technology/Multimedia-Round 1

This is our first year learning multimedia and is also our first year learning with our new facilitator, Cindy. Our first week of multimedia, we were introduced to what is multimedia and research skills. It was very helpful that we get to learn about research skills. We could really use this skill to help us do research. We understand what is primary source and what is secondary source, these skills really help us when we are in college or when we write research papers and stuff. The following week, we learned about the adobe softwares, which includes Adobe Indesign, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. These four adobe softwares are all very helpful for us when we want to edit pictures, create posters, design a book, make a graphic designs, make a flyer and more. Below is the poster I made for the homework I was assigned using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Indesign. Although, we just studied multimedias for a few weeks, I really think it is very practical and helpful.

Poster I designed using Adobe Indesign and Adobe Lightroom,