Friday, February 28, 2014

RA Life: National Eating Disorders Awareness Week

In case you did not know, National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is February 24th to March 2nd 2014. I believe that this is a topic that needs to be brought to attention on college campuses. With the different stressors that are popping up in one's life during this time, eating disorders may silently creep up. There is also a struggle to fit in and one might choose the option of an eating disorder in order to fulfill the goal that college society has placed on them. I wanted to make my girls informed of this week because of the importance that this topic holds. As well as, I don't think that this matter gets much attention on my campus. Here are some of the events that I created in order to bring more awareness to my dorm.

Monday

I taped an informational sheet to all of my residents' doors which included the definition of eating disorders, the types of eating disorders, statistics for the drive for thinness, and three keys for listening to your body. All the information that I used was taken from www.nationaleatingdisorders.org

Here is my example



I was originally going to have a mindful eating event occur on Monday, but my special guests had to reschedule to Thursday. Originally, the name was Mindful Eating Monday. 

Wednesday

When I first thought of the idea to highlight this week in my dorm I wanted to do the idea of Mirrorless Monday. As I was originally planning on having the mindful eating event that day, I changed the day and the name to Don't Worry Wednesday. 

While this event has includes of prep, the result is splendid. 


I covered all the public mirrors around the dorm and put this message on all of them, I also put some cut outs from the document "20 Ways to Love Your Body" from www.nationaleatingdisorders.org. This not only helps to give people something to read, but if people don't end up writing on the paper this gives the paper some more umph. 

Thursday 

My mindful eating event was really informative. An extern from the campus counseling center came out and spoke to us. We later had a chocolate meditation that helped us to understand the parts to mindful eating. Really being able to take in all parts of the food that we are eating so that we can fully experience the process. 

Anyways, I hope that you found this to be informative. Please let me in know if you have any questions or would like the Word document templates for future use. Until next time.

Much Love,
Taylor





Sunday, February 16, 2014

RA Life: A Week of Valentine's Love

I have been meaning to write about my RA life on this blog for a while, not only to express my love for the position, but to showcase my ideas and crafts that I have created while in this placement. This particular post is about my week of Valentine's passives that I showered upon my awesome residents.

Monday


I thought that this was a great way to start of the beginning of the week, with a pen to help get into the right mindset for this week.
Ingredients: Colored paper (regular paper will do just fine as well), Word template for note, and pens (finding enough pens for all of my residents on my RA budget was slightly difficult, but I did it!)
Inspiration-http://blog.bitsofeverything.com/2012/02/valentines-and-new-winner.html

Tuesday


With the same thought as Monday (getting into the right work mindset for the week), I thought the beginning of the week deserved some caffeine.
Ingredients- Tea (I chose black [for the caffeine]) and construction paper/Sharpies (could also do this with a word template and colored paper [might be easier if strapped for time])
Inspiration-http://thehandcraftedcottage.blogspot.ca/2013/02/my-favorite-mondays-no-2.html

Wednesday 


I am kind of a Star Wars nerd and so I needed to get my obsession into these passives somehow. 
Ingredients- I found the Star Wars Valentine's at the dollar store (these are the kind that we used to give out as elementary school children) and pixy sticks! Originally, I wanted to do this with glow sticks like what I saw on pinterest , but my budget would not allow. Pixy sticks it was! Still seemed to be a big hit!
Inspiration-http://cinnaberry-suite.blogspot.com/search/label/valentine's & http://www.pinterest.com/pin/294000681896319049/

Thursday


Thursday, people are starting to get fed up with the week at this point (at least I am). The end is so near, yet so far at the same time. I figured that this day screamed food pick me up! S'more ingredients to the rescue!
Ingredients-Graham crackers (x2 for each bag), marshmallows (x2 for each bag), fun sized Hershey's bar (x1 for each bag, unless budget allows for 2 [mine did not]), seal-able bags (s'more ingredients do not get contaminated), and word template for message.
Inspiration- http://www.babble.com/crafts-activities/16-handmade-holiday-neighbor-gift-ideas/packaged-smores/?pid=7642

Friday


Friday was Valentine's day and while I could have done something super over the top, I decided to go with something small and cute. These little dollar store Valentine's really bring me back to my elementary school days. I liked giving these out on Valentine's day, so my residents got the same experience. The Valentine's came with stickers as well, which I thought was pretty cool seeing as I wasn't going to add any sweets to the mix (figured that they would get enough sweets throughout the day)
Ingredients-Dollar store Valentine's.
Inspiration-Elementary school Valentine's day.

Anyways, I hope that you all enjoyed this. If you have any questions about how I went about doing these projects or want the Word templates, please feel free to comment below! Thanks and until next time.

Much Love,
Taylor

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Beginning of the Last Semester

Well, I have been meaning to expand on my last semester of senior year, but the fact that I have not should clue you in on how busy the semester has been. I am taking four classes, am very involved in a club, WES (Women's Empowerment Society), work 2 jobs, and am an RA. Along with having a social life, you can imagine why I haven't had time to write about the beginning of my semester.

First off, my classes. I have found that I really emulate the motto "go hard or go home". I am taking a semi difficult load of classes. One class is a Native American History course with one of the more renowned professors at my college. This class has already been quite the learning experience and is probably my favorite class. There is a lot of reading, but all has been very interesting. I just finished the first assigned book today: Native American Testimony by Peter Nabokov. I have to take a lot of notes on the reading which I am not used to, but I have realized that taking these notes will help in the long run. We have to do weekly journals where we discuss the overall theme of the week's reading, the major theme and the insights that we had. Having these written notes has already earned me an A+ on the first paper. The next book that I will begin reading is: Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr. That book needs to be finished by next Thursday, but I am excited to begin reading the book.

The next class I have is Sustainable Development. This class is not quite what I expected the class to be, but I think that I am getting the hang of the class. The readings are sometimes really dense, but last week in class we brought that fact up to the Professor and she agreed and acknowledged our concerns, at least she understands. This class is also an intensive note-taking class. Every Thursday we need to hand in notecards on each reading that includes an overall thesis, two supporting sentences and then a few sentences on the insights we had from the readings. Taking notes in a similar fashion to the Native American class helps me to gather my thoughts and figure out the overall theme for my notecards. After receiving my first set of notecards today and getting As on all of them, I figure I am heading in the right direction.

My other class is Environmental Film Colloquium. This class has discussed the variety of definitions about ecocinema which was a genre of cinema that I did not now existed. We have looked at a variety of films and discussed how they relate to the environment and how they are important. We do a blog post every week about our in class discussions and our readings, which have been very interesting. There have been a lot of ways that people critique films and suggest a different view which I had never thought about before. This class has definitely helped me to embrace my open-minded nature. This coming Friday will begin the Environmental Film festival and as part of the class we are required to go to every movie screening and blog about the movies that we see. Maybe I will include some of my class blogs here. Either way I am excited to see all of the movies, I usually only see about one or two year. Being required to go to all of these movies for a week each night will put a bit of a crunch in my schedule, but I am hoping to get a head with the two classes I mentioned above!

My last class is Environmental Education. I am very excited to be in this class because at this point in my life I believe that this is the direction that I would like to go. This class only meets once a week, so I have only been twice but each time I go I am very pleased with my experience. We play a lot of games and we learned last week about constructivist classrooms, which I found utterly fascinating. We do not have class this upcoming Friday which is awesome, because I can focus on getting ahead for my other classes. In two weeks we will begin working on getting certified for ProjectWILD. Which I am quite excited for!

I was a little worried that I wasn't going to be able to handle the course load along with my work and RA position. I seem to feel this at the beginning of every semester and even when I started a new job (happened this summer as my Aunt can tell you). Of course this feeling was amplified when I got sick the second week of school. So of course a lot of my time was spent trying to rest and doing work under the haze of sickness. I did fall a little behind which made me really unsure whether I was going to be able to handle the pressures of this semester. Now being in the third week, I feel a lot better about my schedule and my course load. I am sure being healthy helps! Receiving my grades from last weeks assignments probably helped me to realize that I could handle everything. I was able to get really good grades even through I as sick. If I can do A work when I am sick, then I can definitely do A work when I am healthy. 


Well, this is enough for one blog post, but I will write more on how my RA life is going and my thoughts on the last semester I will have with WES. Until next time.

Much Love,
Taylor