Hello and welcome to my first summative blog post of my grade 11 year! I just finished a project called “Mightier than the sword”. In this project I focused on building my communicating and social awareness skills. The end product of this project was to create a piece of writing targeted towards grade 8’s to give them advice on how to succeed in PLP. The driving question that I aimed to answer throughout this project was “How can we use the power of written text to inspire the new PLP 8 learners?”. 

The project started out with a few writing activities that would be put into a writing journal. In this journal we included a pre-writing activity, writing workshop, and an academic research page with a paragraph. The pre-writing activity was a brainstorm activity that got us thinking about us in comparison to the grade 8’s to open us to ideas in our final piece of writing. 

In addition to this I learnt some writing techniques in writing workshop. This was important because it made me think about my word choices when writing my final product. Before I could create my final product I did an academic writing paragraph. The topic of this writing activity was “Why is PLP better than mainstream learning”. In groups I contributed to brainstorming discussions about what sub-topics could be used to writing about the main topic. After reflecting on ideas such as teamwork, communication, technology, and PBL. I decided it would be best to write my paragraph on Project based learning. To write this I did some research about project based learning to include credibility into my paragraph. I got some feedback from peers, then created a final paragraph. I think this paragraph was an important part of this project because it challenged me to write to a targeted audience, which would eventually be a useful skills for the final product. 

After my academic writing activity I was able to start writing my text to a grade 8. In total I created 5 drafts, but I think that actually help me. I decided to write my piece of writing on the importance of revision.

I then received feedback on my piece of writing from a grade 8. When I reflect I feel as if I did a decent job to communicate effectivity and give advice that is useful. 

To see my final text to a grade out check out my “Importance of Revision” post.

Overall, this project was a great introduction to the year because I was able to challenge my writing style and start working on improving my communicating skills. With the project ending I feel I’ve built up enough understand to answer the driving question “How can we use the power of written text to inspire the new PLP 8 learners?”. I think we can use the power of written text to inspire learners by creating an intriguing piece of advice that covers topics relevant to us when we were that age. I feel as if my final product was able to do that, therefore I’m proud of it. 

What advice would you give to a grade younger than you? 

Thanks for reading,

Alicia 🙂