Found in Translation

Found In Translation Book Cover
Image from: http://novelteen.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/review-found-in-translation-by-roger-bruner-with-kristi-rae-bruner%C2%AD/

 

I am currently reading a book called Found in Translation, written by Roger and Kristi Rae Bruner.  The story begins with an eighteen-year-old girl named Kim, a girl who’s off on a missions trip – one she thinks is to a regular, medium-sized town with all the amenities.  If you had asked her how difficult she thought the trip would be, she probably would have brushed off the question saying it wouldn’t be to much of a stretch; but when she finds out where she’s really headed, her world flips upside down.

Arriving late to meet the senior project director after missing her initial flight, Kim finds herself lost in a meeting where talk about sleeping bags and construction take her by surprise.  It turns out the trip had been changed – and apparently she didn’t get the email.  The group was now going to rebuild houses after disaster struck a remote village in Mexico.  No plumbing.  No electricity.  No where to plug in her hair dryer.  Feeling like an outsider in her brand-name clothes, she realizes she’s completely out of her comfort zone – but how can she turn back when she’s already come this far, and what will people think if she does?

 

 

 

 

Tuesday, April 9th 2013

We have started our new inquiry!  Our question is: Can we make a herbal medicine the First Nations used?

We started researching herbs that the First Nations people used last week and today we chose six herbs we want to try to get and grow to use.  We looked on craigslist and various other sites on the internet in order to find them, and were able to locate some we might be able to get.  Our plan is to get herbs that are already started (not seeds) so they will be ready in time to use.  Starting with a long list, we narrowed our choices down by eliminating those we that didn’t seem as easy to obtain.  The herbs we chose are horsetail, labrador, dandelion, pipsissewa, trillium, and echinacea.  My partner said she can bring in some horsetail and dandelion from her yard, and hopefully we will soon be on our way to starting a mini herb factory!  I’m looking forward to getting the plants and experimenting with their medicinal properties.  

Inquiry Project 3

INQUIRY QUESTION:

Started as: What do shoppers and employees in different age categories think of the music at Lougheed mall and how would they change it if they could?

Ended up being: How do different people react to different versions of the same song?

Our original plan was go to Lougheed mall for about an hour and ask customers to fill out a quick survey about how they liked the music playing. Unfortunately, we ran into a road block when the management at Lougheed Mall wouldn’t let us survey their customers.

The following is a copy of the letter (minus student names) my partner and I took to Lougheed mall management.

Letter to Lougheed Mall Management

After ‘failing’ at our first attempt – or rather not succeeding the way we had hoped – we changed courses a bit and came up with our revised question: “How do different people react to different versions of the same song?”

We then set out to ask those around the school to participate in a new questionnaire we made.

The results were somewhat lacking. We ended up with 24 participants in total. 21 of them were our peers, falling into the 13-18 age category, and only 3 of them were in either the 30-49 category or the 50-64 category. Therefore, for the purposes of our presentation, we simply separated the ages into 2 broad categories: those 29 and under (or 13-18) and those 30 and up.

We presented our findings to our class on December 7th in the following powerpoint presentation. The last slide summarizes what we would do differently if we were to redo the project.

Inquiry 3 Data Presentation

Monday, March 4th 2013

Today we took the sclerotia out of the incubator.  It didn’t look very promising.  Most of it had died and looked infected.  We cut the small area of ‘normal’ looking sclerotia out and kept in in a petri dish in hopes it would dry out completely and be usable in the future.  We also changed the oats in our living culture.

 

Please see my inquiry partner’s blog entry for more details: http://annicah.inquiryhub.org/2013/03/05/march-4th/

 

Wednesday, February 27th 2013

Today we worked on our PowerPoint presentation and pretty much finished it.  We also plated petri dishes with nutrient agar and started the sclerotia process again.  We are converting all our cultures except for one (the new one we cultured from our maze experiment) into sclerotia.  The cultures (2 petri dishes of soon to be sclerotia) are now in the incubator and we will need to take them out about 24 hours from now.