Desmond001's blog

Saturday March 2, 2009 was the last learning lab of the spring semester. It was also the FINAL Saturday lab for seniors period. We worked very hard to get this far and I feel that it has paid off big time. It has been a great experience for me and I am sure it has been for others also. I have matured as a person due to the program and have learned many things because of it. SCANS has been a major factor in these new things that I've learned. At first I thought it wasn't that important and not very useful, but now I can see the benefits behind it. The skills learned while being taught SCANS has helped me make most of my decisions. Following these skills also helped me advance in the program and caused my role to increase. Now I am looking forward to the summer and using these same skills.

Today during lab I had the "privlege" to work by myself on our project. Neither of my partners showed up so I had to bring my A+ game today. I worked very hard and got alot done, granted that i was alone. I stayed focused throughout the entire day despite all of the distractions like THE HEAT!!! I plan to keep up the good work through the rest of my days here in the program.

While working Tim gave me a "TO DO LIST" of things I needed to get accomplished. Of the ten things written on the list I completed three of them, which may not seem like alot but they werent easy. I had to clean up the containers, that will house our reptiles, with mulch and afterwards fill them with mulch. Then water the plants inside of one of the cages. After all of that was completed the worse part came..... CLEANING UP!!! It was already hot so that just added to the torture. I also plan to come in during the week to finish up my list.

Today during lab we did SCANS and College Prep as usual. During SCANS we talked about our personal enrichment hours and why we need them. We also came up with ideas as a group on different things we could do to get more excitement while getting our personal enrichment hours. While in College Prep we played Jeopardy. The different topics were things such as: Preparing for college, Applying to college, ACT, Financial aid, and different worksheets used to get ready for college.

When we broke up into our components, we continued our discussion about enrichment hours. We were told about the different things that were coming up. Then we broke up into our smaller groups that we chose to work in during the spring and maybe into the summer. I chose to be in the reptile group and today we researched general and care information about the reptiles we will be getting. The three animals we will get are a Chameleon, a Box Turtle, and an Albino Rat Snake. I look forward to working with these animals and I enjoy working in my group.

Today at Adams we did an optics investigation where they had to go outside and we had them measure their shadows and also themselves to make comparisons in the different heights. It went well in my opinion it went better than the rest of the investigations that we did in the previous weeks at Adams. Like always though there were some kids who weren't as interested or engaged as the rest but that could be for personal reasons that are out of our control. As facilitators we did a good job moving through the investigations and getting the job done because we always go hard and try our best to get the job done.

AND SHOUT OUT TO FELIX!!!!!!! 

Yesterday we had a talk about how the summer was going so far and some adjustments that we think should be made. So we came across a few problems that we came up with solutions to fix. Some changes that we made were to incorporate some of our techniques from last summer into what we are doing this summer. We also told the supervisors that they should talk to the teens who were in Learning Places the longest for suggestions, and explained how we felt and that we should be the ones who will represent Learning Places in some of the things that are planned for the future since we know so much about it.

The summer so far has been cool. It started off very slow but now we are pulling things together. There is still some kinks that need to be worked out since we have new supervisors and everything like that and also we lost one SHOUT OUT TO FELIX!!!!!!!!!! But us as teens we have learned to work with one another and listen to each others opinions. So it can only get better from here.