Summer Staycation 2010

Currently: replying back to all my birthday wishes on Facebook.

If I could describe my summer in one word, it would be busy. But other words come to mind: friends, Whistler, family, fun, food, oatmeal, parties, clarity, realization.

I was involved with so many things that when I was listing them off, I could tell my friends were already waiting me for me to stop, but yet I would go on. My activities kept me very busy during summer, but I learned a lot, gained valuable experience and met some amazing and dedicated people.

Friends were a big help to my busy schedule. Work and fun should balance out and I had a lot of fun, such as various house parties and most notably a weekend at Whistler. It was great reliving my May long weekend last year and I had a lot of fun even though I was still 18. My friends were also very accommodating to my schedule: props to you guys

I also spent more time with my family. During finals, I would often not see any of them for days at a time, but I’ve been making up for it this summer. One of my goals this year is to not stay at UBC for so long and have dinner with my parents more often.

Putting the Science in Sport

What do you do when you’re sick of university and have 2 weeks to take a break: you go back to elementary school.

And that’s exactly what I did for 3 days this week through participating in a Reading Week Project (RWP). What’s a RWP, you ask? Basically a 3-day volunteering event held every year during Reading Break where UBC students get to work with elementary school students and teach them a variety of things, such as the environment and First Nations art.

The project I volunteered for was called the Science of Sport at Queen Victoria Annex and we (30-ish students) taught the students the relationship between sports and science. The awesome people who organized this project came up with 10 different activities in a variety of topics, such as physics, nutrition, and biology. 2 students teach each activity for the entire day and the rest are chaperones, taking groups of children to the activities in different rooms of the school. We get to teach different activities every day to mix it up, so the same 2 students don’t have to teach the same activity everyday and get to do something different and not get bored as well.

Day 1

My day started at 7.30am when I woke up in order to get to the school by 8.30am. The trip to the school was very easy because it was only a few blocks away from Commercial/Broadway Station. I met a lot of UBC students, none of them that I knew before, and had a few ice breakers to get to know each other. My favourite game was Bang Off (I don’t know if they made up the name). Due to communication errors, the school actually thought we were going to be there the following week and weren’t ready for us to have a tour of the school. Therefore, we settled for having a lot of preparation time for the activities. I was chaperone for the day, so me and all the other chaperones basically sat around and talked for a good hour and then we went to our group of kids.

The first activity I brought the kids to was called Exploring Motion, where they got to build luges. The activity was kind of disorganized because the activity sheet describing the activity didn’t explain how they children were going to build luges from cardboard tubes and tape. Therefore, we settled for decorating the tubes and racing marbles down the tubes, the result being flying marbles all over the lunch room. I heard back from the activity leaders that the sessions were better after the first test-run.

The next activity was about friction, and the kids (you guessed it) learned about friction. They were split up into 2 teams and built ramps with wooden blocks to race mini-cars with. After that, they compared whether the cars raced faster down the side of the ramp with a towel on it or the side without. Friction was also tested with different sized books to see whether surface area plays a role in friction, and then bringing it all back to friction in Olympic sports, such as speed skating and snowboarding. The kids were pretty good at the activity, but while they were building the towers, a bit of competition resulted, each group wanting to build the tallest tower.