Ollying To Altruism
For my second semester as a freshman we did a project about how generosity affects others and ourselves. In this project, we studied generosity; what causes it and how we can increase it. We started this project by meeting our "design buddies" at Explorer, we asked them questions and created a personal night light for them. The second part was writing our philosophies, we wrote what we felt about generosity. The third step was designing our own project, we were paired up based on our beliefs and we created a project around that. The final step was documenting it all with a photo journalistic essay.
Helping Without Giving Money
We both believed that instead of giving material items you should donate your time so we volunteered at LiveWell and The Jeff and Deni Jacobs Child Development Center. Communication and stress would best describe these past four weeks. Interacting and communicating with people gave us a better sense of community. When we are around people we can see the effects of our generosity. At the end we were stressed because it was hard to schedule times to volunteer at organizations. It was fun at first because we wanted to help people, but towards the end we didn’t feel like we were actually being generous. The pressure of our project got to us and made volunteering less enjoyable. To read more about our project, take a look at our blog. http://helpingwithoutgivingmoney.weebly.com/
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Helping Without Giving Money - Photojournalistic Essay
To view our drafts, click here
Designing My Own Project: Helping Without Giving Money
For the past four weeks we've been working on a project centered around generosity. We were paired up based on our philosophies, my partner and I both believe that instead of donating money or material items you donate your time. We wanted to show that you can help without spending money. So, he and I went to LiveWell senior Center and Jeff and Deni Jacobs Child Development Center to volunteer. Click Here For Blog
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Night Light Project
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For the past couple months we've been designing night lights for 1st graders at Explorer Elementary. My design buddies were Noel and Angela. For this project we talked to the kids and asked them questions about themselves, we then took that information and created a night light for them. We created files in Adobe Illustrator and cut them into wood using the laser cutter. After we finished putting the boxes together we gave it to them.
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Visiting My Grandma
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My grandma or Oma as my family calls her unfortunately got sick and so we had to take her to hospital. My grandpa or Opa was in the Army and my dad works for the NEX so we get the luxury of going to the Navy hospital. My grandma got really good treatment there and they did the best they could to help her.
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Trash Pick Up/Photography Practice
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Today my team and I went to the bay located a few feet from our school to pick up trash since our project is based on generosity we went over there to clean it up and make the bay look even more beautiful. One part of our project is to create a photo- journalistic story, we decided we were going to practice our photography skills over at the bay and capture whatever we thought was pretty/interesting. Here are my photos to the right:
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The Photo I Chose
I chose this photo to edit because it's a very simple image that can be spruced up with a little bit of photo shop; whether it's messing with the color or cropping. Pictures of the bay are always really nice looking to me. I also chose this photo because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I used to always take photos of the bay in 7th grade because I thought it was so beautiful over there.
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The Story Behind The Photo
I really liked this photo because it showed what I think the bay is most known for, the rocks. The rocks are all around the bay but they are all different, some are large like the ones in the bottom left and some are small like the ones in the bottom right. Each rock has it's own story, maybe a couple sat there and enjoyed the peace or maybe someone let their first child climb on the rocks. Who knows? All I know is that each and every single think on the bay has it's own story and maybe we should take time to read it.
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Becoming More Generous?
When I first heard about this project I didn't know what to expect, a project to make us ninth graders more generous? Good luck with that. After doing some research on generosity it made me realize how easy it is to become a generous person. We also got the opportunity to go to the Jeff and Deni Jacobs Child Development Center. I saw this little girl named Alicia and she wanted me to play dress up with her, I said okay thinking that she was going to be the one dressing up. I was wrong, she had me put on a purple princess dress that only fit up to my elbows, then she had me try on a pink and black skirt that managed to somehow fit. Seeing how happy the children were when we came was a heart warming experience, it was so amazing to see the happiness even though they have a great deal of sadness at home. View Full Reflection Here