The Process
For my fourth project, I worked with two other peers (Haley Adams and Ashley Doughty). All three of us knew we wanted to help our community and give back, we just didn't know who we wanted to give back too. In the beginning, we thought about giving back to children but we ended up choosing to give back at a nursing home around the holidays. Many activities were planned and lots of research was done throughout the whole month. Our research was on the nursing facilities, medicare, and how we can better the future of medicare. After the basis of our project was done, we still needed to figure out what nursing home we wanted to visit. Our school helped us get in contact with a local nursing home, called SpiriTrust Lutheran. After numerous back & forth emails, we finally figured out a date to visit. To go along with our project, we came up with the idea of making a scale model of what we thought represented the room we would be in at the home during the holidays. A video was created based on the opinions on the future of medicare from multiple teachers/ faculty members who were interviewed. The last thing we did was create a new medicare plan that would hopefully make medicare less expensive. One thing my group and I had to take notice is on Synthesis. Synthesizing means to combine multiple ideas to create a whole new idea. Including this in our project wasn't as easy as we had thought but after multiple conversations, we were successful. For the English portion of our project, we ended up creating new activities with the help of older ones that the elderly favored. For Art, different materials were used to create one final product and lastly for history, we took the old medicare plan and with peoples opinions, we created a new plan for making medicare more affordable.
Art
When coming up with ideas for what we wanted to do for art, the group and I knew we wanted to create something better and more creative than our last 3 projects. After using images on google and conversations with our art teacher, we chose to create a scale model. The scale model would represent a room in the nursing home and how we thought it would look even if it wasn't completely accurate. We used cardboard to lasercut a fireplace and a door. With the floor, we made it look like a wooden floor and painted the walls inside. The 3d printers were used to print out our christmas tree representing the holiday season, a table to represent playing activities and bingo, and the couch representing a object used for conversations. By lasercutting, painting, 3d printing, and using cardboard, they all came together to make a scale model portraying a big part of the project.
The photos up above represent the process of the laser cut, spray painting the couch and tree, painting the Christmas tree, and finally the final product. A story that can go with relating to the stockings on the fireplace is that a resident we had met named Elmer, showed up all the stockings he had created for his grandchildren, children, and great grandchildren. In total, Elmer has made 42 stockings over the years.
English
Our story on a candy cane with uneven stripes.
The first step we took for English was researching activities that residents do in nursing homes and created different activities to relate more to our holiday theme. MadLibs was one of the 2 activities we made that were based on stories like Frosty the Snowman. The other activity was bingo in which we created a holiday themed bingo card and a traditional bingo card. To complete the English portion, we created a story book about a candy cane with uneven stripes, named Charlie. Other candy canes made fun of him when Charlie goes sledding, causing him to run away. As Charlie was going home, a candy cane named, Chloe, complimented his stripes leading him to stick up for himself and the other candy canes to stop making fun of him.
History
We wanted to create a new medicare plan that would help Americans be able to afford medicare. Research was a important part of making sure we come up with a pratical plan. Wanting different opinions on medicare, we interviewed teachers and staff in our school to help answer 5 questions. This helped improve our new medicare plan consisting of benefiting Americans of all ages, making sure medicare will support citizens when traveling outisde of the United States, and having every American be entitled to medicare without being the age of 65 or up. There are different plans of medicare and they tend to be on the more expensive side so we decided make it so that every American is able to afford one of the plans. We also made an option where you are able to pay for a "package" that consists of all three of the most important medicare plans. Synthesizing was used by taking the old/current medicare plan and creating a new medicare plan that would be more practical.
The first step is to have every tax paying American pay $100 into the government. The government will then take the $100 and add it into a separate account. This account will be put into place that will feed into a medicare fund so that everyone can have medicare.
Old law: Every U.S. citizen is eligible for medicare at age 65
New law: Medicare for all people all ages
Changing this for medicare for all will help everyone get coverage at birth.
Old law: Medicare does not cover for U.S. Citizens outside of the of the United States.
New law: Medicare will be covered no matter where you go.
A lot of Americans travel outside of the U.S. for vacations and business trips, and to get insurance coverage you have to pay for an extra insurance package. Allowing this to be part of the Medicare will help Americans save money and not make Medicare expensive.
Old law: You have to qualify for medicare
New law: Everyone is entitled to have medicare.
To qualify for medicare, you have to meet one of the three standards that medicare has. By changing that to everyone being entitled will help Americans get the insurance coverage they need even if they do not meet the standards.
Old law: Every U.S. citizen is eligible for medicare at age 65
New law: Medicare for all people all ages
Changing this for medicare for all will help everyone get coverage at birth.
Old law: Medicare does not cover for U.S. Citizens outside of the of the United States.
New law: Medicare will be covered no matter where you go.
A lot of Americans travel outside of the U.S. for vacations and business trips, and to get insurance coverage you have to pay for an extra insurance package. Allowing this to be part of the Medicare will help Americans save money and not make Medicare expensive.
Old law: You have to qualify for medicare
New law: Everyone is entitled to have medicare.
To qualify for medicare, you have to meet one of the three standards that medicare has. By changing that to everyone being entitled will help Americans get the insurance coverage they need even if they do not meet the standards.
If the average American income is roughly $59,055, 10% of that income will go into medicare plan. That being said, $5,905.50 goes into medicare yearly. The average American will need to pay $492.12 a month to support their medicare for the future. The old pan has the American pay 6.2% of their income into the system, which only has them paying %3,543.30 yearly, which breaks down to $295.27. Paying little more each month will help cover for all the medicare expenses that are needed. Of course, this would be different for an American whose income is only $20,000 a year. With research on medicare system and how it works, we were able to figure out an appropriate plan that may help Americans for their future.
Extra Photos
We made centerpieces for the dining room tables. Took clear mason jars and covered them with glue, then rolled them in bath salts. Unfortunately, we did not have time to help decorate the jars in ribbon, plastic red cranberries, & white rocks for inside with a fake candle switch.