About
The Senior Project is a year long independent assignment that will help our community, have a legacy, be regorous, and have used at least 100 hours of our time. To determine what our project would be, we had to create a driving question. Mine was "How can I provide fresh ingredients to my community while bringing them together?" To find a solution, I decided to create a community garden in my apartment complex. To reach 100 hours, I decided to make it more challenging and build the garden beds myself.
The Process
Phase 1
1. Getting Permission
getting permission from my Apartment Manager, Angelina Walker and the school to do this project
2. Research
Looking for cheap sturdy supplies to use to build garden beds. I found a youtube video where they build garden beds out of pallets.
3. Preparation
Talking to Mr. Hazlet to see if he would let me build in his class, and getting my Uncle to help me gather pallets with his truck. I also later ordered FDA approved wood sealant.
4. Contruction
Building the garden beds in peices for easier construction at the final location. Cutting all of the wooden boards to size, connecting them to the wooden peices at the top and bottom to create the walls, sanding and sealing the wood, etc. During the middle of construction I had to switch building locations to my grandparents house.
5. Setting up
Getting my Uncle to help me transfer the garden bed peices over to the final location to put the peices together and gather 35 five gallon buckets of dirt for the beds
6. Community
I created a small event for members of my apartment complex to help me plant some seeds and get my neighbors together.
1. Getting Permission
getting permission from my Apartment Manager, Angelina Walker and the school to do this project
2. Research
Looking for cheap sturdy supplies to use to build garden beds. I found a youtube video where they build garden beds out of pallets.
3. Preparation
Talking to Mr. Hazlet to see if he would let me build in his class, and getting my Uncle to help me gather pallets with his truck. I also later ordered FDA approved wood sealant.
4. Contruction
Building the garden beds in peices for easier construction at the final location. Cutting all of the wooden boards to size, connecting them to the wooden peices at the top and bottom to create the walls, sanding and sealing the wood, etc. During the middle of construction I had to switch building locations to my grandparents house.
5. Setting up
Getting my Uncle to help me transfer the garden bed peices over to the final location to put the peices together and gather 35 five gallon buckets of dirt for the beds
6. Community
I created a small event for members of my apartment complex to help me plant some seeds and get my neighbors together.
21st Century Skills |
Pros and Cons |
This project used almost every single 21st Century Skill in the Student Handbook. The most used ones though were probably Communication Skills and Thinking and Problem Solving. The entire point of the Senior Projects is for us to learn how to get past challenges and grow around them. Talking was one of the biggest things I did, through phone calls, meetings, text messages, Amazon, etc.
The biggest thing I was able to grow with was learning the different ways of professionally communicating and learning a completely new skill. I learned how to dress and ask for help in a respectful way that made me look competent and like I knew what I was doing. I also learned how to do some woodworking which was something I had never done on that large of a scale before.
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I am so proud of the garden beds that I built for this project. This was difficult and complicated and they turned out well enough people had thought I had bought them and I was estatic that they worked.
This project was one of the hardest assignments I have done to date. There were literal blood, sweat, and so many tears that went into this. Some specific challenges though were things like the wood sealant I ordered. I wanted something that was food grade and was going to last in harsh weather conditions. The sealant I ordered took around two months to come in and I had to cancel the order and reorder it at some point. Another was I ran out of screws at the last second and had to find another way to work around it. Although, the largest was probably my Apartment Manager, Angelina Walker, dissapeared from the complex and completely ghosted me. She was replaced by Ivy Lavaka, who told me she got fired. My entire project rode on if Ivy was still okay with me building the garden and if she was not I would have been screwed.
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What Could be Better |
Past and Future Learning |
There were so many things that I would change if I could. I would have built a fence around the beds to keep some animals out and put tarps inside the beds to keep the water in more. I wish I had also spaced out my time even more and had better ways of dealing with the burnout that came with a project of this size, because I definitely lost a lot of steam during the middle and end of this project.
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This related to my Junior project as this is like a larger version of that one. As much as I do not like doing a Senior and Junior Project, I think doing the Junior project really helped prepare me for this one, as I was allowed to make the mistakes I could not afford to in this project.
This project will follow me throughout my life. I will use the things I have learned though experiences from now to when I am old and senile. Being able to get past those challenges has made me more determined, more sure of my decisions and honestly more confident in myself.
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