Daily Archives: December 4, 2012

Snow Globe :)

This is another one of those crafts that I’ve been waiting to do since the beginning of the semester. It was one of the first crafts that I found, and since then the idea of making my own snow globe has been lingering over my head. I wanted to wait until it got closer to the holidays and was expecting the weather to be a little colder, but oh well I still got to make my own snow globe.

I first started by getting a premade globe (my initial plan was to use a mason jar, but I found the globe instead) then you need to find little statues of whatever you want (I just went to where they have things for miniature villages and picked out a snow man and a tree) you will also need to get some glitter that has the potential to look like snow. And lastly, you will also need either super glue or a hot glue gun. Once you have everything you can start. This is an extremely easy and cheap craft! It kind of blew my mind how easy it was, I knew myself and was slightly worried. So first you have to glue the statue/objects to your base and allow that to dry. Then flip your globe upside down and place an even amount of glitter there. Be careful, because I got carried away with all of the sparkles, which resulted in a huge cloud of glitter that looms over my snow man. Once the glue is dry, you can fill your globe with water and stick in the base. Depending on what you use you might have to seal the base so that the water doesn’t leak. So far I have had no troubles with my premade globe and it has yet to leak. Overall it is a relatively easy craft that is pretty much flaw proof. My only tip of advice would be to not get carried away with the glitter like I did. Hopefully if you try this it will be just as awesome as mine and you’ll get a new little Christmas decoration.

Shedding light on Child Soldiers

This week instead of writing two blogs about the same thing, I’ve decided just to combine the RCL and WIP blog together to focus on the History of a Controversy project. Like I said last week, my group’s topic is child soldiers. Before we started doing any research I had no idea what info child soldiers entailed.  After finding some good articles on the library database I realized how important of a topic this is. I knew that kids were fighting, but I had no idea the emotional turmoil that they are faced with. The fact that most of them end up killing their parents is unbelievable. I think of myself as a child and can’t even imagine understanding how to operate a weapon (to be honest I probably wouldn’t even know how to know). After learning more about this topic I realized just how relevant this was. For some reason I had in my head  that this wasn’t still happening as much, but much to my dismay it is. I feel like in our project/video we can shed some light on what is going on. And also how being a child soldier has long term effects on those who were one. After talking today in class, my group decided that we wanted the people to cry after the video, and after learning some more info that will not be hard at all. Like I mentioned last week, the music could really make or break our topic. If you use a solemn song throughout the entire nine minutes, then we will be able to create a somber attitude and theme throughout the video. Also being able to use the images of children will hit the center of most people, as they are a great way to encourage an emotional appeal to the audience. As for making the video relatable, I think that everyone in the class can relate, in the sense that we’ve all been kids and could very easily think of ourselves in that situation (or maybe not at all). Overall, this topic is extremely important and needs more attention brought to it. The Kony ordeal earlier this year shed some light on it, but that ended up being a scam and lasted for roughly a week. Hopefully our video will be better informed and give some really insightful information into child soldiers.