Pig Dissection Blog Post

Our Pig Dissection Video aka Jemimah the Baller!

The real deal (GOTTA WATCH!) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW1REKnDW6E

The purpose of the pig dissection was to see how the organs and systems of the body work together to maintain homeostasis. By dissecting the pig, we were essentially looking into ourselves, to learn how our own bodies work. In this unit we learned about the different systems in our body, the organs within them, and how homeostasis is maintained. In this dissection, we got to see the organs of the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, and endocrine systems. My favorite part of this dissection was cutting open the heart because it was really cool to see the arteries and veins. I think the dissection was a valuable experience, because I now have an idea of what my body would look like inside. It also helped me understand where all of the organs are located in the body. 

20 TIME Reflection: Not Just Trash Project

I chose to do my 20 Time project, the Not Just Trash Project, because I'm concerned about the direction we are heading in. Americans make so much waste compared to the rest of the world and it is going to hurt us in the long run. I wanted to inspire people with cool project ideas of how to convert trash into cool items. I want people to know that there are ways around throwing away everything.

My original plan was to create a blog and post frequently on it tutorials of converting trash into cool items. I thought of different ideas to convert small and large items into cool stuff and made a plan for my blog posts.

Getting the project started was slow because I had to make a plan of what I would do. Once I had the plan, I made some posts and did a lot of research. My project evolved from just the blog and posting tutorials, to also raising awareness about political issues relating to this topic. Overall, I think I now have a good foundation for the blog.

The challenging part was figuring out what to do in class. Unfortunately, my project made me do a lot at home and not much in class. I should've picked a different idea for 20 time because for this project, I needed time at home.

Through this project, I learned skills such as planning and scheduling. My project required a lot of pre planning and thought. I learned to plan in advance and put together a well thought out plan to look back at later on. I also learned that I needed to create a schedule for myself. This helped me be more productive.

Unfortunately, it was very hard getting viewers to my blog. I don't have many channels of outreach that I could use. Because of this, I'm not continuing my blog because no one will see what I post. However, I think this project has taught me to be more clever and reuse my own trash. I now know what it takes to actually create a blog and get an audience to it, and how hard it must be to actually be a successful blog.

I will still be encouraging people to reduce their waste and find ways to convert their trash into something useful.

Unit 9 Reflection

This unit was about how we classify life, and the evolutionary relationships of life's forms. We learned that taxonomy divided organisms by domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. The domains are archaea, bateria, and eukarya. Within eukarya, life probably started out as marine life, and eventually transitioned into land species, starting with the tiktaalik that could do a push up! Eventually, life evolved into amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals.



We also did the What On Earth Evolved Presentations. I thought my presentation went pretty well because I didn't read off the slides as much as I expected myself to. It was a fun experience over all because it was nice to hear information from other classmates rather than only the vodcasts. I think an area I could have done better in is speaking without filler words and "ums" and "likes". I really worked on that a lot for this presentation, but I should do that even more.  Link to my presentation is here.

It was really interesting to learn about all of the different organisms, especially the invertebrates. I didn't know that most of the invertebrates we learned about even existed. For example, the echinoderms, platyhelminthes, cnidarians, etc. I want to learn more hox genes because they seem very interesting and somewhat mysterious. I also want to learn about archaeopteryx because it was the transitional species between dinosaurs and birds. I also want to learn more about archaea, and the latest research.

archaea growing in a hot spring.

Over all, this unit was really interesting to learn about the vast diversity of life on our planet.
Link to previous reflection
Link to geologic timeline showing animal diversity on earth