By Amelia J., Class 702
This year the 7th-grade exploration question was, ‘Is Our Relationship With Animals Ethical?’ I thought that this was a very powerful question that doesn’t come up very often when talking about problems in our society. The workshops we did during this time were also really engrossing, as they were talking about issues that aren’t usually discussed. For example, our ELA teacher Ms. Rosenberg taught us how animals are treated in the Fashion Industry, and our Science teacher Ms. May taught us about Animal Testing, and Animal Cloning. I thought that all of these workshops were really compelling and thorough in their examination of how we view our relationship with animals. And the topics we didn’t discuss in class, we got to discuss during our field trips. For example, when we went to the New York Aquarium, and to the Prospect Park zoo we had the opportunity to discuss animals in captivity.
For my project, I worked with my friends on a mini-movie that discussed the problems that plastic is having on the sea creatures living in the ocean. In the project, there are three girls who were turned into sea creatures by a fairy godmother. They explore the ocean and learn how plastic is damaging the ecosystems there. When they return they learn all they can about plastics in the ocean, and even develop a robot to help clean the ocean. Soon they start teaching viewers some statistics about the ocean and plastic.
Something I really liked about exploration this year was that we were sorted by what topic we were doing, not be what kind of project we were doing. This helped to spark new ideas as you work with people who have the same topic. You could also do anything you wanted to! Some people sold reusable bags, and gave the money to charity, one person even had a bake sale to help the bushfires in Australia. However, something that I think could improve is the amount of time we had. We didn’t have that much time to work on our projects or to do the workshops. The workshops were really interesting and I know that most of my classmates would have loved it if we had more time for them! Overall, exploration was a great experience and I know that my friends and I can’t wait for the next one!