Since October, I’ve been focusing on systems of equations, inequality, and function. The areas that I feel I learned very strongly are something like graphing, writing equations from graphs or tables, the average rate of changes, minimum/maximum point, and some word problems. I often feel like I really need to improve on word problems because, one is the language, sometimes, I need more time to understand what it wants us to do. Word problems are something that is challenging for me but as I experienced, I got better at it the more I do and practice those word problems. In class, what I think I did well was working with friends – helping each other, and doing exercises in teams. Having work done on time as well as working on my own speed to make sure I understand. I usually don’t ask many questions until I practice it, then I’ll have some thoughts in mind to ask – either Jeff or my friends around me.
My goal for this round and the following rounds for the rest of the school years. Umm. Number one is to have better planning on homework, Khan specifically. Let’s say, the Khan is due one week from today, and there are 14 sections in the unit. So, what I need to do is to have a goal of doing it every day, two sections per day; something like that for planning. I also need to ask more questions in class related to the content. Even though I might not have any questions but I should ask to clarify or something like that to understand more.
It’s been great working with you and everyone in the class because I’ve learned much new stuff or reviewing something I’ve learned before in the government school but I forgot to get it back into my brain. I hope to achieve my goals and continue to learn more about math!
Let’s rewind back to last year during our first round of English literacy class. I was excited as soon as I knew the theme of the round was about Refugees. According to the United Nations, there are over 70.8 million refugees on this planet, and 30 million of them are under the age of 18. Even though it is just a small amount compared to the entire population, if all the refugees were the population of a made-up country, they would be ranked as the 20th most populated country.
“Inside Out and Back Again” Book by Thanhha Lai
Let’s get back to what we did in our class. Have you ever heard or read a novel Inside Out and Back Againby Thanhha Lai? The author quoted the novel’s description, “Inspired by the author’s childhood experience as a refugee—fleeing Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon and immigrating to Alabama—this coming-of-age debut novel told in verse has been celebrated for its touching child’s-eye view of family and immigration.”. I really enjoyed spending time working on this theme and learning about what happened to the country and the citizens, the hard times of refugees, and the lives of many during the war.
To take the lesson into the perspective, we had been assigned to make our own novel poem. We discovered many stories of the refugees around the world and wrote our own poems inspired by them. I was influenced by a story from Afghanistan, but I won’t spoil the story here, I would love you to read it at the end of this article.
To sum up the lesson I’ve learned from the experience of the refugees, the information, and lives during a really tough time like them made me imagine the perspective of myself (e.g. what would happen if that ever happened to me? What would that change my life? How would the country be like?). I suggest you read the novel if you are interested and below is the poem I composed. I really hope you enjoy reading and explore around in my portfolio, thank you, and have a great day!
INSIDE OUT
(Mimmy = Munny)
My name is Munawar,
I am 18 years old,
And I am from Afghanistan.
I fled because of the notorious Taliban,
Dropping bombs,
Making bullets rain,
Is peace possible with the Taliban?
I was lucky enough,
To live in a safer place,
But still controlled by the Taliban,
We still can’t live peacefully,
They did not allow me,
And even my friends to work,
So, LIFE is like NOTHING!!
After my 18th birthday,
Mimmy told me to go to Paris!!
One day before leaving,
I spent all my times,
With my family,
Including my parents,
Grandma,
Grandpa,
And I couldn’t imagine leaving
Every one of them!!
The next day has come,
And I had to say goodbye!
The personnel carrier came to pick us up!
It’s hard to describe my feeling,
Mixed of joy and sadness,
I was so happy and full of joy,
But at the same time,
I felt so sad and sorrowful,
To leave everything behind.
While going to the airport,
We faced the people at the office of the organization,
Asking us in English to test us,
I knew if I speak English,
I’ll be in trouble,
I was scared,
My hands are shaking,
But I pretended to not speaking,
And replied,
“No…..Anglis”, which means no English!
I was sitting in there for a moment,
I wrote a diary with my extreme feeling,
Here’s what I wrote my mimmy;
Sitting here is not easy,
This is making me feel like once again,
I am accused of an offense, a treason,
Dear mum, these guys have the same rough attitude,
As the people who were interrogating me,
At the beginning of my imprisonment,
Do you think I will survive a new life with such a start?
Every round of English Literacy, we learn different themes and “Happiness” is the theme for this round. The big ideas of the themes are to define happiness, how can we achieve happiness, which is essential to ensure happiness, and what is the nature of happiness.
To begin the round’s theme, we watched a video about a man who was called Mr. Happy Man. So, Johnny Barnes (Mr. happy man) was a native Bermudian man who performed a daily ritual of standing on a street corner in Bermuda’s capital city of Hamilton to shared positive affirmations to passers-by since 1986. If you want to watch the video about him, click here. What I learned from that video was how people can be very happy and motivated by positive affirmation. Also, when you make someone happy, you’ll be loved by all of them.
Besides that, we also read a few articles about different ways of happiness, significant details about happiness in the articles, and how can we achieve happiness. And now, I am writing an essay about how to be happy when you don’t have friends. The essay is still in progress of editing so if you are interested in reading it, please stay tuned and I’ll post it in just a few weeks. What I think of the essay is that even though you face problems, there are so many different ways to be happy.
Python is one of the programming language that is used in computers. In this post, you’ll get to know how I felt about coding and my favorite lesson.
My favorite lesson was about Python lists. Python lists is a lesson about how we can store item in a list or making a list of something. After spending times learning and exploring around, I knew how to change item value, loop through a list, check the list, and add or remove items. To practice, we learned how to create two random teams from a list of players. Code Club is a website that helps us to practice the exercise. If you’re interested and also want to learn how to create two random teams from a list of players, click here.
First, I thought that learning python or coding in general was hard and complicated but it was actually not. It was hard at first just because I knew nothing about it and it looked complicated. After learning, I enjoyed coding and exploring around and even wanted to learn more coding lessons.
Mathematics, as known as Math is one of the basic, important, and my favorite subject. I felt so enthusiastic about the class and shows a lot of appreciation, and now, I realize that I love Math than I thought since I was very young.
For this round, we studied with two leveled books at the same time since the two levels are similar. The books that we learned were Primary Mathematics 5B, and 6A. We get to learn mostly about percentage, angles, and triangle. Now, I know how to convert percentage into fraction or decimal, I know the different types of angles and triangles. We did many exercises and activities in group and it improved my teamwork and communication skills.
For me personally, I think that even though it’s Math class but we still get many skills, too. I hope to learn many new lessons in the next round and stay tuned, there will be more post coming soon! Thanks for reading!
Before I start telling you about what I did in Math class, I have one exciting thing to share first. The exciting thing is that I received a new book (from 5A to 5B)!
The lessons that we learned were decimal, measures, and volume, percentage, and data analysis. What I enjoyed the most was the decimal lesson. For decimal lesson, what we learned were converting fraction to decimal and decimal to fraction, round and estimate the decimal, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with decimal.
For my thought for this round is that it was really fun and enthusiastic. I worked in groups a lot which helps me with teamwork and collaboration. That’s it for this round! Thank you and don’t forget to come back next time!
For this round of STEM, I’ve enjoyed learning the lesson and got to do many experiments. Basically, the topic that we focused on was “Carbon”! Well, the mini-lessons in this topics were hydrocarbon, properties of carbon, and the carbon cycle.
For the lesson, we were assigned to answer ten questions that were written down on a paper. Actually, that was not a test but it was the guiding questions that helped us to understand the lesson better. To make it even more clear to understand, we did an experiment called Black Snack Experiment.
For the black snack experiment, we put aluminum foil on a bowl. Then we filled the bowl with sand. After that, we put 5g of baking soda and 20g of sugar and mixed it together. Then, we put it in the bowl. The next step is that we need to pour some alcohol all over the bowl. Finally, we just need to fire the matches and put them in the bowl. Those were the instructions. After we put the matches into the bowl, the black ashes rise up like a snake. It has a shape like a snake. The ashed felt like styrofoam, but when we squeeze it harder, it broke and turn into normal ashes.
It was a very exciting round of STEM. Thank you for reading and visiting my portfolio. Have a wonderful day!
In this round of multimedia class, we continued learning about Python. In this portfolio post, I will summarize what I did in the third round of multimedia essential.
Python Conditionals and If Statements was the first lesson that I learned. In that lesson, what I learned were Booleans, Comparisons, Indentation, And & Or & Not, If statement, Elif statement, and Else statement. We also learned about Python for loops. For this course, there were only three lessons, Break statement, Continue statement, and Range function. The last lesson was about Python While Loops. Infinite while loop, while loop, break statement, continue statement, and else statement were the courses in Python While Loops lesson. We also practice writing codes and solved some coding exercises in a website called Codeboard, it’s a web-based IDE to teach programming in the classroom, easily create and share exercises with students, and analyze and inspect students’ submissions with a single click.
Thank you for reading and visiting my portfolio! If you have any questions, please email me (rayout.n@ligercambodia.org) and I’ll try to respond as soon as possible. Have a nice day!
Every round of English literacy, we have different themes. For this round of English Literacy, the theme was about “The Search of Identity”.
For the first week of the round, we started the theme with genetic. We thought about how do we know who we are. Then we read a CommonLit article called “Where Did I Come From” that was written by BirdBrain Science published in 2016. Then we read another story called “The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros in 1984. After that, I also wrote a paragraph about my name.
For the first day of the second week of the round, I studied about connotation and denotation. Connotation is the figurative, emotional, and cultural meaning attached to the word; shades and degrees of meaning. Denotation is the dictionary definition and literal meaning of a word. After that, we read a poem called “Where I’m From” that was written by George Ella Lyon. Next, my classmates and I wrote our own Where I’m From poem inspired by George Ella Lyon. Then, we post it into FlipGrid and if you want to watch mine, click on this LINK.
The next lesson was about story elements graphic organizer. Then, we watched a short animation film called “The Present”. Then we wrote about the story elements which are exposition/hook, characters, setting, conflict/problem, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution/solution. We also introduced to tone, mood, motif, foreshadowing, suspense, poetic justice, conflict, and theme. We didn’t learn all of them at a time so we got to learn only tone and mood first. So we watched another short animated film called One Man Band and thought about the mood and the tone. Then, we learned about foreshadowing. We read a story called “The Land Lady” and identify the foreshadowing in that story. If you are interested and want to read it, click on this LINK,and if you want to watch the movie, click on this LINK.
My classmates and I were reading four different books, and they are Monster (Walter Dean Myers), Looking for Alaska (John Green), Wonder (R. J. Palacio), and The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton). So, I chose Monster to read. It was an interesting book and I also recommend you to read it, too. Not just reading, I also needed to discuss what I read with anyone who read the same book as me.
That’s it for this round! Hope you enjoy reading it! Thank you!
In this round of Khmer literacy class, I was very enjoy learning new interesting lessons. What I’ve learned about; part of speeches, learning new words and preparing for an event coming up very soon.
For Khmer part of speech lesson, my classmates and I were assigned to do research about different Grammar tenses such as noun, adjective, verb, adverb, conjunction, preposition, pronoun, interjection, simple sentences, complex sentences, and voiced & passive voiced. Well, I was researching about interjection. After we researched, we all presented and shared with our classmates about what we’ve done.
The next lesson was about learning new words. Well, we needed to read a book and find vocabularies that I think I don’t know the definition or not sure what it really means, I wrote it down into the book, and then find it out and learned together as a class.
Last but not least, we started to prepare an event that will possibly be held in my school, the Liger Leadership Academy. The event would be starting soon before next school year. Both cohorts, junior and senior will be doing about different topics, and for me, I would be doing about the indigenous community in Cambodia or the history of Khmer language and alphabets.
Thank you so much for visiting my portfolio and I hope you enjoy reading it!
