Jolyn's Blog for Hotdawgs

What we found after thirty minutes My project, which I titled "Clean Waves for Babes", embodies what I wanted to see in the future: clean bodies of water. I hated seeing plastic floating in the waters of Santa Cruz. Although I struggled in the beginning (very much so...which you can read about  here ), I found my way back to a goal that not only I can achieve, but the humans on earth. What I did was two clean ups: a beach cleanup and a creek cleanup the following day. Instead of collecting the waste with plastic bags, I decided to use reusable buckets. I filled THREE whole buckets at the beach! The creek cleanup was also a success. My group filled an entire garbage bag of shards of glass and plastic bags. I believe that it's going to be an annual event for Saratoga High! In the beginning of the project, I would have given myself a B-. I had all the information to carry out my plans, but never followed through. The concepts were good but were too intricate. They w

In replace of a video, I decided to write about it instead of show it. External Anatomy: Usually, the fetal pig is a light beige/ off pink color. To dissect it, you must tie down the wrists on the plate to have the ventral area exposed for dissection. The wrists of the pig is cut out of the diagram, but just like humans, it would be located near the ends of the arm. The shoulder is spread openly, which can be found after the elbow of the arm. Digits are essentially the fingers and toes of a pig. They are connected to the wrist, at the end of the arm. Those two structures allow the pig to move. The thoracic cavity is everything from the diaphragm and up. We'll talk about what goes into that portion of the pig later. The abdominal cavity should be everything below the thoracic cavity. To determine the sex, you look at the urogenital opening. On males, it should be located near the umbilical cord. For females, the opening is near the anus. Digestive System: In a digestive sys

On May 20th, I arrived at the Calabaza Creek in Cupertino. My friends and I participated in the river cleanup that was an event created by the leadership class. For about three hours, we walked along the creek, looking for trash, but overall, the creek was decently clean. The only thing we found an abundance of was shards of beer bottles (I think). There was the occasional plastic straw or bag, but not as much as I was expecting. I even made new friends from the other classes and got to know them through trenching across the puddles of water. I realized how much fun helping the community is and the satisfaction of creating a better environment for the leaders of tomorrow. 

A recap of what my project is all about: I decided to host two different cleanups. One was a beach cleanup at Capitola Beach last Friday, May 19th, and the other was a county wide river cleanup on Saturday, May 20th. I chose idea after countless of other failed attempts for this project. I wanted to impact the bay area, and besides having cleaner beaches and rivers, the main goal was to educate students about the importance of clean bodies of water and be one step closer to a pure environment. Below are the flyers I made for the two events to get the word out. My initial plan for this project is not the plan I ended up doing. If you look back on my last few post about my 20-Time, they've been changing since day one. When I finally settled down on this idea, its was already the midway point of the project. For the goal of my project, I knew that if I wanted it to be successful, I'd have to spread the word out, hence the flyers. I wouldn't call this whole experience su

This unit was all about taxonomy and classification. It was first created by a Swedish botanist in the early 1700's. He founded the system of binomial nomenclatures that separated themselves into eight levels of organization. This is still used today! The broadest category would be the domain which it divides into three: archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. The next level would be kingdoms. Eukarya contains of protista, fungi, plantae, and animalia. Fungi and plantae can be easily described, or easier than animalia. Animalia has over fourteen different, major groups, or phylums. There are chordates, arthropods, echinoderms, and etc. The next levels, in order, would be class, order, family, genus, and species.  Even though this unit was pretty lengthy, I wish we could have expanded on more concepts. I wish we applied the classifications in history, like how would we classify dinosaurs and other animals that can be found in the geologic timeline. This also goes with out last unit, and y

In this project, we created a timeline of Earth's history, which is broken down into eras, periods, and epochs. One of the major events that happened was the formation of our planet. Occurring 4.5 billion years ago, massive rocks collided and used the power of gravity to pull other rocks within it. Without this huge collision, we wouldn't be standing here on earth today! Another major event would be the when oxygen became more abundant 2.4 billion years ago, creating breathable air for us.There is a hypothesis about how the first oxygen caused the entire planet to freeze, this event would be called a "Snowball Earth". Lastly, the most distinctive and notable event would be the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. There are many theories as to why the dinosaurs vanished. The most common explanation would be the asteroid hitting the Earth and vaporizing. It killed off about 80% of species, and the remaining would evolve into the feathery, flying animals you see t