Eastern Kentucky Church Trip

Over the summer I went on a 1 week trip to Eastern Kentucky to help build homes for people who can't afford to finish their homes. I did between 30-35 hours for that week not including chores around the house we stayed at like dishes, cleaning bathrooms, and cleaning the house. I did my serves in Eastern Kentucky. I did not choose to go their I wanted to do the trip with my church and we happened to go their. What I got out of this wonderful experience was the enjoyment of giving and helping people who need it. Here is a picture from that trip.

(2016) Church Of Our Savior. 

Bellua

For the first class for the year the unit is called Stories the class is HUMANITIES. In this unit we explored stories form other cultures. For this project we had to create our own planet. Then we had to draw a picture of something that is in our story. The thing I did the best on this project the drawing the picture and making details for the story. The thing that I had trouble with was cutting it down from 1300 word to shorter. I over came this project by adding and deleting paragraphs that don't need to be there. It helped a lot but it was really hard to cut some things out of the story. Read below my story and below it is my picture.

                                                                                                                              

I will tell you a story about how a special planet was made and the story of a special man. I was told about this story when I was young. My grandparents were told about this. So take a seat and enjoy this story of a strange place.

There was a Planet called Bellua, which was never at peace because monsters and humans, who lived there, were always fighting. It was created when a dark force and light force slammed into each other and made a big explosion, creating one big planet. The dark force was named Mefastofeles. The Lightforce was named Akilos. The dark force is like hell and the light force it like heaven. The planet was a mistake. It was not supposed to happen that way. The dark and light forces were brothers. There are many features to this world, the first one is the planet itself. The brothers fought and the planet was the result. The light force was the sun and the dark force was the moon. Akilos wanted to make a perfect world but Mefastofeles had a different idea. Akilos tricked Mefastofeles and locked him up in a cage. He made a key that the first human to be created on the planet would have. The key was a mark on the first man’s arm and that would be the key. If that man got rid of the mark, the cage would open. The second feature is the man with the mark. The man who had the mark would live forever not aging at all. When the man was created he was already a full grown man in his 30s. With the mark still on the man, the cage is locked. If the mark comes off the man and the cage unlocked, Mefastofeles would come out and the whole sky would turn red. Once that happened the planet would go to hell from there and everything would turn bad. Mefastofeles would make monsters that would outnumber the humans. Mefastofeles would start destroying everything and make it into his own image. For everyone on the planet, it would be bad. Since the beginning of the planet, parents trained their kids how to hunt monsters in case Mefastofeles escaped. Children were like warriors fighting the dark. The monsters were pretty much kept in check. 

Meanwhile, the Man who had the mark lived in a house in the middle of nowhere. The house was be protected by a spell, which made it invisible to everyone. When you went to the exact spot where the house was located and then you cast a spell to unlock the house you would be able to see it. Akilos put the house there so that no one would try the get the mark off of the man. When the man with the mark needed food or water he would have to hide the mark and try not to be noticeable. The man with the mark was the only being on Bellua who could see the house without magic. This was for the safety of the planet. If anyone got the key, Mefastofeles would escape. It was vital that he stayed in the cage. You could say that Mefastofeles was trapped in the cage like tuna in a can. The man with the mark was the key to everything.

The man with the mark asked Akilos if he could have a baby so Akilos gave him a baby and his name was Harry. From 1 to 15 Harry lived a normal life on Bellua. When he turned 15 it all went to hell. Harry’s father was killed when he went on a hunt to kill a Vampire's nest. But actually, the man with the mark died by a spell the vampire used on him. The spell broke the mark’s spell and in doing so the man with the mark died and Mefastofeles was let out of the cage. Mefastofeles then killed the vampire and pretended to be the vampire. He knew that Harry would go looking for him and he did.

The third feature was the box that belonged to Harry. When Harry heard about what happened, he remembered something that his father had given him. His father had said, “When I die open the box.” So Harry went to look for the box. He finally found it, and he opened it. Harry’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. All of his fears went down the drain. The box was originally the man with the mark’s box. He made it and put everything in it for Harry. It had everything about being a hunter and everything you needed to know about monsters. For 2 years Harry learned everything about hunting and monsters. Harry was in a state of incertitude about his future, but he sent ahead with his plans anyway. He then faked his death and burned down his house so people wouldn’t go looking for him because he was only 17 years old. He made a fake ID and hacked credit cards. He went out to find and kill the monster that killed his father. Harry allowed himself to be a subordinate in the hunter training program until he became a master.

For years he searched for the vampire that killed his father. Finally, he heard that the monster was in purgatory. So he found a vampire and he made the vampire turn him. Before this, he was agitated but he decided to do it anyway. After that, he killed the vampire that turned him. He then took a stake and put it in his own heart. He woke up in purgatory. He went around fighting and killing all the monsters he could find while trying to locate the monster that killed his father. It was like a disease that had taken over him, a malignant tumor that needed to be cut out.

He found the monster but before he could kill it, the monster revealed himself as Mefastofeles. At that moment the earth turned black. Everything was dark. Harry was in a state of felicity, he was happy. He thought that he had killed the monster but he hadn’t. Suddenly everything just stopped. It was like nothing had ever happened, like Harry was not there. In fact he was not anywhere. It turned out that Mefastofeles had gone back in time and killed his father before Harry was born. So what that meant was that Mefastofeles had time traveled back before Harry was born and killed his father. That way could not have been born. So Mefastofeles had omnipotence over everything on the planet after all.

Now you are probably wondering who I am and how I know all of this. I am the being that started this all. I am the cause of why this cruel place was made. I am the darkforce, I am the master of all evil. I am Mefastolfeles and I am Harry. I created another one of myself to be the man with the mark’s son. That Harry was like the center of the earth everything went around him. If I did not create him I would have ended the planet a lot sooner. So I went back in time a killed the man with the mark before he asked Akilos if he could have a baby. You must be wondering how I could of done that when I was in the cage. What Akilos did not know was that I added a spell to cage. With the spell I I could do everything I wanted to do except leave the cage.

Now you will excuse me. I need to take care of Akilos.

AA. (2016) Bellua. 

Gorilla King Kong

For the first class for the year the unit is called population the class is STEAM. In this unit we investigated what is population and what is included for population. In internal we studied mathematical and scientific systems of species. For my project I loved how we went to the zoo and got to look at our animals. The thing that I struggled with the most was writing neat the mathematical problems. I over came that by taking my time and going very slow.

My animal is a Gorilla. Its scientific name is Gorilla beringei. I made a collage mosaic then a slide show with a picture of my animal with arrows pointing to where each taxonomic level is.

Taxonomic Level	Your organism’s group	Key characteristics of group
Kingdom	Animalia	They are multicellular.
Phylum	Chordata	Have a tail
Class	Mammalia	Have fur
Order	Primates	Have nails
Family	Hominidae	Large brain
Genus	Gorilla	Apes that inhabit the forests of central Africa.
Species	Gorilla  beringei	The eponymous genus Gorilla is divided into two species.

Here is my reference photo for the collage:

                                   

Parker Elementary School. (2016)  Gorilla

Next will be my collage mosaic.

AA, Gorilla (2016)

Next, I compared the Gorilla with Lynx and Rattle Snake. Here is my Venn diagram. I had two partners for this Venn diagram. MJF, one of my partners, did his animal project on a Rattle Snake. MN is my other partner. She did hers on Lynx. Click on the names of my partners and you can see their blog.

                                  

AA, Venn digram (2016)

Below are my mathematical statements that describe the population for Gorillas using set theory.

                                            

AA, Math Statements (2016)

Work Cited

Aaronmoringdangier. "STEAM Exhibit – The Sea Otter." Aarongce. N.p., 2016. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.

Answers. Answers Corporation, n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.

"GorillaGorilla." Primate Factsheets: Gorilla (Gorilla) Taxonomy, Morphology, & Ecology. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Sept. 2016.

Pizza Meals

This is my Last Action Project for my last term, Food For Thought. In this course we are studying about how to review foods. For this Action Project we had to choose a food to get at a restaurant and a home meal. We had to research a lot about our food. We had to find the food, review it and say what we smelled, tasted and felt about the food.  We also had to take a picture of our foods. The thing that I am most proud of is making the whole project. Something that was hard for me was reviewing it.  Please learn more about the project down below.

AA, Food Meals,(2016)

People either hate or enjoy pizza. Since I love pizza it will be my homemade meal. I will prepare a medium sized pizza. In these couple of paragraphs I will share my notes. The pizza looks like a square of meat with bread around it. It looks green and big. When you look at the pizza you can see steam coming from it. The pizza also looks outstanding. The pizza smells like green peppers and onions. When I took the pizza out of the oven it smelled earthy which reminds me of the outdoors. As for the feeling of the pizza it is hard and harsh.  When you feel it, it also feels warm and humid like a warm fire. The pizza bubbles so it sounds like birds pecking in the summertime and maybe like the breeze in the morning. When I eat the pizza is crunch and chewy at the same time.  It also tastes lemony. The dish I made appears fresh and organic to me. I know this because when it came out of the oven I had that feeling of perfection that I had just made a wonderful pizza. Six adjectives I would describe this meal are good, juicy, great, homemade, hot, tasty, Italian. The ingredients are: Mild Italian sausage, pizza sauce, mushrooms, onions, green peppers, green olives, black olives, Romano cheese, Mozzarella cheese, and hot roll mix. You can get all of these ingredients at Mariano’s. Overall this meal was very delicious and when I finished it I were full.

To compare my homemade dish with that of a professional, I wandered out to the Chicago Domino's pizza restaurant. The pizza looks like meat with sauce on it. It also looks like an angel coming down from heaven. It smells like the beach in the summer. It smells like flowers on a summer's day. The pizza feels like a smooth ground. It feels like a hot pot. It sounds like a stove pan sizzling. It sounds like the trees in the summer. When I eat the pizza it sounds like a wood being thrown in a fire. The pizza taste sweet, like very sweet. It also taste lemony sometimes. Six words to describe this meal are creamy, crispy, wholesome, lumpy, fine and saucy.

The dish that I preferred was the homemade meal. It had a more unique taste because I added more ingredients to it. Although the restaurant meal was delightful, it was much too crunchy. I thought that the homemade meal had a more preferable smell to it like real organic onions, pepper and sausage. The texture for the homemade meal was more tangible. When you touch it you can feel the warmth of it like a warm fire burning and the dough was crisp outside and soft inside. Over all the homemade meal looked more perfect. In the end, the homemade meal also sounded better. When you bit down on it you could just hear it sizzle. I would recommend the homemade meal, because overall it tasted, sounded, felt and looked superior. I would also recommend it because you could taste every ingredient in it. It tasted crunchy and smooth at the same time. The homemade meal was also quite a bit heavier, so after 10 or 15 bites I was full. Overall the homemade meal can have more foods within it so that means it might taste more perfect than each ingredient was originally. It can also be stored more easily than the restaurant meal.

One of Pollan’s five food transformations is called ‘from quality to quantity.’ This relates to my homemade meal for three reasons. The 1st is the quality of the meat is important. The 2nd, the quantity is huge-there are two pounds of hot Italian sausage in the meal. Lastly, pizza is a big meal because a whole group of people can eat it and enjoy sharing this together. Pollan’s 5 food transformations ‘quality to quantity’ is related to the restaurant meal for three reasons. The 1st one is that it does have a little quality from how it is packaged and sent to the person who ordered it. The 2nd one is the quantity of it is big. For the 3rd and final one this meal is big enough to feed ten people at a party since there are two boxes. Overall, both of the meals can be understood through Pollan’s 5 food transformations because they both can speak to quality to quantity.

In conclusion both of these meals are good in quantity but overall the homemade meal is the greater one out of both of the two meals because it was far superior in quality.

GMOs Are They Bad Or Good

In the STEAM course "Food" we are learning about GMOs and if they are bad or good. We also learned about the mathematics of GMOs data. We also had to examine different sides of the GMO debate. For the project we had to research our position and write a convincing argument. I like how the end results of my data turned out. I also like the graph that we had to do. What I am proud of is my whole video in all. The one thing that I could have done better was talk much lower in the video. I also thought that I could have practiced a little more before I made my video. For the graph my two dates were 1998 and 1999 there was a 8.6% change going up between the two dates. You can learn more about my video and graph below by watching it and looking at the graph.

GMO Debate: AA Argues Against GMOs from GCE Lab School on Vimeo.

1998-1999 blue
43-38=5 43/5
8.6% change going up.
What this means is the 8.6% change in diabetes.

This graph represents that the soy and corn crops are going higher but diabetes is going up higher with GMOs in foods. These both have to do with each other because the GMO’s can lead to diabetes. The red is how high it is going for the rate of food with GMO’s in them from farms. Imagine that a little kid had allergies and ate GMO’s and died. This could happen because GMO’s can make new allergies and maybe kids who already have allergies can maybe get another as opposed to someone who doesn't consume GMOs.

Works Cited

"Monsanto Utilizing Ivy League Influence to Push out Even More Genetically Modified ‘solutions’ to Problems Caused by GMOs in the First Place." GMO News – GMO News and Information. Web. 24 May 2016.




"Real Costs of GM Crops Concealed." Friends of the Earth Europe. Web. 24 May 2016.




Sonima.com. "Understanding the Controversy and Science of GMOs." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com. Web. 24 May 2016




"ZhengTianyu's Blog." ZhengTianyus Blog. Web. 24 May 2016.

External Credit

For my community service hours this year I did a bunch of different activities to help my school community and my own community. For my First External Credit I planted trees. I worked with the good people at GCE Lab School for 5 hours. The thing that I can take away from this is that it is good to help the earth. For my second External Credit I did a run with GCE that was a 5 hours event. What I got out of participating in this event was that running for a cause is a good thing. For my third External Credit I went to Under One Sky SDG's Event. I went with my classmates. The thing I got out of it was that it was fun. For the fourth External Credit I went was went to the Oxfam Hunger Banquet. I did this with my classmates. It was an interesting experience to see how much people can eat and can not eat teaching us about hunger and poverty. For the fifth External Credit I went to The Grove went to The Grove to do magic for seniors I did it three times it was for 3 hours. What I got out of it was that I like to see seniors smile. For the 6 External Credit what I did was work at my school. I did it with a friend and workers who worked on the new GCE school. I did it three times and it was for 16 hours. It made me happy to help my school. For the 7 External Credit I worked at my church. I worked with some of the people who go to my church. I did it three times it was for 17 hours. What I got out of it was I like to help my church.

Magic, One up, (2016)

Growth Population

This is my second Action Project for my last term, Food For Thought. In this course we are studying in this unit is to see what a global food system looks like, and to understand the human and environmental impacts of this system. For this Action Project we had to choose a global issue that is happening in the world. We had to research a lot about our our issue and how to learn more about it. We had to find way to fix that issue and named three ways we could do that. We also had to find a way to address that issue that we are learning about. The thing that I am most proud of is making the whole project. Something that was hard for me was recording the project. Since I had to record something I made many mistakes but it all ended well. Please learn more about the project down below.

 

How many people can the earth hold? There are about 7.125 billion people living on Earth right now. Many Scientists think that the Earth can hold up 10 billion people. According to Live Scientist: “So 10 billion people is the uppermost population limit where food is concerned. Because it's extremely unlikely that everyone will agree to stop eating meat, Wilson thinks the maximum carrying capacity of the Earth based on food resources will most likely fall short of 10 billion.” My position is that I think too many people are being born in the world and soon the earth won’t have any more room for more people. One of the reasons why we have so many people here today is because many years ago people died much younger due to disease and lack of proper nutrition. Life expectancy was very short. Now people are much safer and healthier than they were before with food security. My solution is that we need to colonize other planets. In 2027 nine people will go to Mars and start a community. That community and others like it will have to grow dramatically. The development of food systems can be traced back to the origins of the production of food surpluses. These surpluses enabled the development of settled areas and we can use this on Mars.

We may have to have more than one earth by the rate humans are growing. “One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the fastest- growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population.” This is a global issue because in the next 9 years the world population would be more than 11 million more than the earth can hold. This means soon there would have to be more than one earth.

Many civilizations had a growth problem but each one had a different way of fixing it. According to BBC News: China had a one-child rule. If they had a girl, sometimes the girl was killed or abandoned in order to get a boy. Other countries use ultrasound to abort girls and have boys. This is causing a population imbalance with too many men in some countries and not enough women. That may lower the birthrate. The earth had less people before because there were a lot more diseases like the Black Plague. After the Black Plague a lot of the people were dead and the food was bad. The Black Death it was caused by Yersinia pestis bacterium. The Black Plague first exploded in Europe between 1347 and 1351. According to Empires Of Food: “It’s likely that 10 percent of Europeans starved to death around the year 1316.63 Worse carnage lay ahead. In October 1347, a mere generation after the famine, the bubonic plague hatched in Sicily.” The estimated number of deaths was 75 million people. After that it got better since they made food better and finds ways for people not to get diseases. Now people are still dying from some diseases but less than it was before. What we can learn from history is that advances in food and health change the birth rate. Now we have cures that can help us with some a disease. According to the Empires Of Food book: “By growing and storing food surpluses, the monasteries became business, cultural, and financial centers, as well as dietary hubs. Monks were such noted businessmen that one medieval writer observed that, around one monastery, the River Seine was a channel for vessels that trade in many goods. Abbots signed trade agreements with other abbots. The monks at St. Denis, for example, had a long-term arrangement to buy salt, wine, and oil from their colleagues in Marseille.” What this quote means is that the monks fixed the food that caused so many deaths. They used that to preserve food and made it better to make the food healthier.

A couple of ways I have so we can reduce the population growth is Even some people will inhabit Mars that is only 9 people out of 7 billion people that won’t do anything to help the population be smaller. We need population control. Supplied can be sent to Mars for the people and more people can stay on Mars and other planets. People could try and make a rocket or something that can travel to Mars and back to earth more easily and faster. A last way to reduce the population growth is to have everyone educated or to focus on having every young person educated. Three ways to address the population growth is “provide universal access to safe and effective contraceptive options for both sexes.” “Guarantee education through secondary school for all, especially girls.” “Integrate lessons on population, environment, and development into school curricula at multiple levels.” People will say it will be expensive to educate and it will take too long to give the supplies to Mars. Yes it will be expensive but we could create robots to help us. We could also find away to make it shorter for the time to get to Mars. In the meantime people need to have less children.

Soon there would have to be two earths in order to withstand the population growth. “One possibility they consider is that future world fertility rates will remain what they were in 1990. The consequences of this, with accompanying small declines in death rates, are startling. By 2025, the world would have 11 billion people, double its number today. Another doubling would take only a bit more than 25 years, as the fastest- growing segments of the population become a larger proportion of the total. By 2150 there would be 694,213,000,000 of us, a little over 125 times our present population.” My recommendation to achieve slowing population growth and finding new planets we must make it's a priority. My last thoughts are that we need hope for our earth because of how the population is growing. If we keep on making more and more people be born on earth the world might die of hunger and diseases.

WORKS CITED

Abhiprerna, Abhiprerna Smit. "10 Effective Ways to Control Population - List Crux." ListCrux. 31 Jan. 2016. Web. 02 May 2016.

Bryan Bryan. "Civilization and Economic Growth." Civilization and Economic Growth. Web. 02 May 2016.

"China to End One-child Policy and Allow Two." BBC News. NA, 29 Oct. 2015. Web. 10 May 2016.

Cohen, Joel E. "June 2016." Discover Magazine. Web. 02 May 2016.

"Food Systems." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Web. 10 May 2016.

Fraser, Evan D.G., Andrew, Rimas “Empires Of Food." Arrow, 2011. Print.

"Nine Population Strategies to Stop Short of 9 Billion." Worldwatch Institute. 11 July 20012. Web. 02 May 2016.

TechMediaNetwork, 2011. Web. 02 May 2016. 

Wolchover, Natalie. "How Many People Can Earth Support?” LiveScience.