Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Eras

Letter to Bartolomé de las Casas

Instructions:
The year is 1501. You are a Taino servant named Juanico. You were recently taken away from Bartolomé by order of the Spanish Crown. Write a letter to him urging him to do something about the encomienda system in the Americas and the treatment of Tainos and other indigenous people.


Dear Barteolomé,
How are you? I hope things are going well over there.

The government just took me again and it's terrible. I have no idea what they are going to do to me. They might abuse me or even kill me. I'm taking a big risk by writing this letter to you and please, please, please take every word I tell you and spread it.

I need to talk with you about the encomienda system. I thought it would be a fair system that would help our society move forward. I thought my tribe would be protected. I thought peace would be brought. I thought us Tainos would have a better life. But we didn't get any of that. Instead, we were forced to convert to Christianity and become slaves.

They made us slaves! We work 24/7, 7 days a week, 365 days a year doing all the dirty work that our "owners" are too lazy to do. We work in mines to collect gold, we raise livestock, we run the plantation and plant crops, and if we don't and rebel against them, we'll get killed. I've seen plenty of my friends and members of my tribe gxet killed because they didn't want to be slaves or convert into Christians.

They don't understand that we are humans, not animals. We have the same amount rights that an animal has. We are all equal. We should be treated better. Help us, do something.

You must change this.

From your friend,
Juanico

Reliability, Bias, Inferences

This advertisement shows that a bottle of Fanta Grape Soda is made out of all grapes. From background knowledge, I am 100% certain that Fanta is NOT made out of all grapes. In fact, after checking the ingredients list in a bottle of Fanta Grape, I found that the first few ingredient in this drink is carbonated water, sucrose, citric acid, and flavoring. Continue reading the list and you will find no signs of grape! Instead, there's Red 40 and Blue 1 food colouring to use "in small quantities to give products a vibrant and attractive color", according to the Coca-Cola Product website.

Just by comparing the advertisement to the actual product, you can already tell that this ad was created to be a biased advertisement. This ad is reliable but at the same time not reliable. The reason this ad is reliable is that it's from Fanta, a real company. However, this ad is giving a false impression to viewers as it shows how Fanta is 100% grape when it's really not, which makes it untrustworthy.

Reflecting on my findings, I infer that this Fanta advertisement is trying to attract people to buy Fanta's beverages by showing viewers how Fanta doesn't have all this sugar and junk in it and is all grape, when it's truly not.





Sources: http://www.coca-colaproductfacts.com/en/coca-cola-products/fanta-grape/
Image found on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/272608583671892833/

Letter To My Past Self

Dear Johan,

It's going to be a prolonged and gruelling experience. It will test you. But in the end, you will pull through and mature as a stronger individual.

The next stage of your 7th-grade science curriculum you’re about to face will make you make mistakes, it will make you lose your cool. But listen to me, don’t attempt avoiding the mistakes, you will need them. They will help you with your future.

You have always worked well with others in regards to group projects, however, when the many opportunities to become a leader came your way, you have always declined. But the continuation of not grabbing opportunities is inevitable. One day you will have to become a leader, and that day will be very soon.

Your next science unit is natural disasters. You will be put into a group not of your choosing consisting of two other members, one being supportive, cooperative, and friendly, and the other you could say the opposite of that.

Working in a team setting always has its challenges. Different individuals have different perspectives, personalities, and ways they take on tasks. Listen, you will have differences with your teammates. You will feel like you want to work against them instead of with them, however, you’ll have to learn how to manage conflict.

On top of the various personalities in your team, no one will step up and become the leader of the group, so you will have to take on that responsibility. It will make you anxious, but stay tough.

Being the project group leader is something you have little experience with, and if not done correctly, can cause your team to fall apart, and you do not want your team to fall apart.

As you try out this new experience for the first time, you will have disagreements, you will carry extra burdens, you will feel pressured to keep your team moving in the right direction, you will make mistakes. . Those mistakes are what will shape you and make you who you are, the person who is writing this letter right now.

Having the leadership role also means getting everyone on the same page and dividing the work evenly and fairly. You have to be strong and guide and support your team through tough, difficult times. When you will try to divide the work up, you will find that things don’t always go your way and other people want to do their own thing.

“I’m doing parts A, B, and C!”

“Those are the easiest parts, can we split the work more fairly?” You will ask.

“...But they are already mine. I even wrote my name there already.”

“But if you take the easy parts, you will leave us with all the hard tasks.”

“Yea. So what?”

Bringing the team together is the biggest challenge you will face during this project. It’s hard, it’s tough, but when completed, it’s all worth it.

Being a leader will require more work and responsibility than you think. 

Watch how you act, don’t lose your composure, and most importantly treat other team members with respect, no matter how different they see things than you.

Just remember these words: composure, respect, hard work. And you’ll be a great leader.

You got this.

Your older self,

Johan

PE Goal

MY PE GOAL FOR 8th GRADE

1. Here’s what I know about myself as a mover.(answer these on your own then share them with a partner of your choosing)

• I really like to play basketball, swim, and gym sports.

• I think I am kinda/pretty awesome at playing indoor sports that require speed and explosive power. Ex. Basketball, Tchoukball, Water Polo.

• I find the most challenging sport or activity for me in PE is Track & Field. The reason for this is that I have a hard time running long distances and doing field events.

• I prefer team sports or activities.

• This year in PE I would really like to achieve a quicker mile time.

MY GOAL

“I.... want to improve my 7th grade 4th quarter mile time by 15 to 30 seconds... by the second mile run in 8th grade... by running more often... on the track near my house or on the treadmill in the gym... so I can improve my running endurance for other sports I like such as basketball.

Feature Article Blogpost

For the last few weeks in RLA and Health, we have been working on making a feature article. Throughout the making of our articles, we have chose a topic, developed a slant (or opinion on the topic), researched, had a design lesson with Ms Dowd, and designed our article.

Over the past weeks, my topic and slant changed quite a bit. My original topic was sleep and how it related to stress, but after attempting to research this topic, I couldn’t find any sources. This made me change my topic to sleep deprivation. Now, I had to develop a slant. My first slant was about the negative effects of sleep deprivation. But I felt that it wasn’t specific enough to make my article unique and stand out from the others. I thought about making my slant more specific, and using the knowledge I already had, I broke the negative effects into two parts: physical health and mental health. I chose to focus my article on how sleep deprivation negatively affects teenagers’ physical health, but then I realized I was more interested in researching about the negative effects on teenagers’ mental health. So then I changed my slant to how sleep deprivation negatively affects teenager’s mental health. That was the last change.

My researching process was fairly simple. My sources were from Webpath Express, a research engine, which can be found on the SAS library website. For the note taking, I used a three column chart. The first column was the source information, the second column was the notes itself, and the third column was the analysis, where I analyze how the notes relate to the article. On top of that, I highlighted my notes to organize my data even further. Each color represented a topic. Here are the colors I used:

Yellow: Related to Mental Health/Behavior Slant

Green: Sleep Hours, Facts & Percentages
Blue: Solutions

Orange: Causes
Red: Domain Specific Language

After the researching process came the drafting. There isn’t much of a process when it came to drafting, so I’ll skip that and move on to designing my article. Before designing our articles we had a lesson with Ms Dowd about design. I learned that an article has to have multiple columns and all the images have to fit each of the columns. For example, an image can be one column wide, two columns wide, etc. But it can’t be one and a half columns, etc. Also, I learned that there is a drop caps in every article at the beginning or introduction. A drop caps is when the first letter in a paragraph is bigger than the rest. Finally, I learned that you should use a color pallet and be repetitive with the colors in your article. When I say repetitive, I mean sticking with it for the entire article and making it a pattern. Like all the subheadings will be green and all the body text will be black.

Designing A Spinner

Project Adventure Reflection

1. Name and explain your game and rules. 
The name of my group's game was Marco Pacman, a combination of the popular game Marco Polo and Pacman. The objective of the game as a Pacman is to be the last Pacman standing while the objective of the Marcos are to get everyone out.

The rules are as follows:
There are two Marcos who are blindfolded and the rest are Pacmans. The two Marcos are watched and accompanied by someone not playing for safety purposes. This game must be played in a gym with lines on the floor. All the Pacmans have to stay on the lines and can't jump lines, but the Marcos can travel anywhere. When the Marcos yell Marco, everyone else replies Pacman.
If a Pacman gets tagged by a Marco, the Pacman must sit down in between any two lines and can tag other Pacmans traveling on the lines to get back in, but this can only happen if the player is on their butt. The Pacman who got tagged must sit down in the nearest gap in between two lines and the Pacman who tagged the other Pacman is back in the game.
The game ends when all Pacmans are sitting down and out.

2. What were the challenges/ difficulties of working together as a team? 
Communication was a big issue. We all had great ideas but compromising to finalizing the game came with lots of conflict. Everyone had a good ideas but making them into one idea was an issue because everyone wanted to share their new ideas instead of trying to work together to create one idea.

3. What was the benefit of working together? Explain? 
The benefits of working together was that a lot of different ideas were being created, which allowed us to really choose which idea was the best. Also other group members have different perspectives about your ideas, which can make your idea even better. Finally, working together gave us team members to test our game on a smaller scale, to see if the game actually works.

4. Discuss ways that your team problem solved to make the game better (this could have been as the class played the game). How would you modify the game if you played it again? 
There were many tweaks we made to our game as we were finalizing it. An example of this was the rule where Pacmans could get back into the game by tagging other Pacmans, this made the game more fair and more interesting.
Something we could modify is the way people travel on the lines because it was quite hard for the Marcos to tag the Pacmans when we played the game in PE as a class. This was because all the Pacmans were running and the Marcos were walking. Another thing we could modify for next time is the rule for when a Pacman gets tagged. Instead of sitting in the gap, they would sit on the lines, this would solve the issue of the Marcos having difficulty catching all the Pacmans.

5. What did YOU contribute to the team?
As a team member, I contributed to the making of the rules and the testing of our game. Whenever we tested our game on a small scale, just our group, I would find all the possible scenarios that might happen in a real game so that we could make rules to fix that. For example, I showed how our original idea, tag on Pacman lines (the taggers are NOT blindfolded), would take forever when I just kept on chasing my teammate as that person just continuously ran until the got so tired the gave up