Category: Events

Twitter POLs

Angela on

 

Welcome back to my humble, humble blog. Today is a very special day, it’s the day where I have my Transitional Presentation of Learning. This is a semi-annual meeting for the student, teacher, and the parents to reflect on the year. These happen twice during the span of the school year and you can check out last summer’s post where I reflected the the work I was proud of and what I could improve on. There’s been a little change to our conferences and this time they’re called, “TPOLs” This stands for Transitional Presentation of Learning and are to address the question, “Why do you feel ready to advance to the next grade level?” Using examples from our blog, we are to reflect on our growth as a learner, our work habits, work ethic, areas for improvement, teamwork, responsibility, and production of high quality work as a PLP learner. We are also reflecting on our goals we set at the beginning of the year and seeing how we’ve progressed and completed those goals. Instead of reading off a blog or script, we are to tell a story about our learning and experiences this year.

To start this off, I’m going to reflect on my growth as a learner. Some things I’ve improved on would be my time management and organization. I’m able to predict how long something will take me and I’m able to break the work down into parts so that I can complete sections of the project little by little and I won’t feel overwhelmed. I’ve become a lot more skilled with the iPad and its applications. I’m able research things faster and I can use apps like Explain Everything, Keynote, or Paper by 53 to express my ideas. My ability to problem solve has grown a lot this year, with making prototypes for our Blue Sky project to our Metaphor Machines.

Lucas measuring wood for our Metaphor machine

I’ve learned the consequences of procrastination, such as staying up late, getting sick, missing out on events, or falling behind in school. Once I begin a project, I work very hard on it but I will sometimes put off initiating it. I would be delayed after school by eating and slacking however I’ve improved much on that. Knowing which project to work on first and prioritizing is something I have some room to improve on. Knowing how much sleep I need and how much I need to eat to have enough energy for the day is also something I could improve on. Working in a neat invironment is something I’ve learned to be key to having a quality project with little stress. I’ve learned to ask for help and when to ask. I need to continue on not procrastinating but planning and utilizing a calendar to my advantage. Becoming a leader is something I’d like to do to make it easier to bring my ideas across. You can look at how I plan to do this by reading my gifted writing blog post.

An example for revision would be my Cell City project. This was a science project we did where we needed to match organelles inside a cell to city parts and make a poster of the city. If I’m being honest, my first draft wasn’t all that pretty. So I took it home and spent way too many hours on it, paying a lot of attention to details instead of the overall picture.

In a project awhile back called the Metaphor Machine I was shunned out and wasn’t allowed to do much. I changed the situation by instead of asking, “Can I work on this?” To, “I’m going to work on this.” This helped me to be assertive in group projects so that I can take part in what I’m skilled with. Another example of teamwork is that I always try to help others whether it be stacking chairs after school, picking up garbage, or cleaning up after the Blue Sky exhibition instead of being in the gym.

Angela at Blue Sky

I’m proud of lots of work I’ve done but some of the greatest would include my writing that was part of the Frankenstuffie project. These were journal entries that my frankenstuffie was sending to his long lost friend. Another piece of work I’m proud of would be my Jean Talon video which I spent a lot of time animating and it was worth it.
I think that moving up into grade 10 will be different however I think I can tackle the challenge. I’ve learned so many great skills from PLP that will help me in the future and my learning process. To have had the field trips made the concepts we were learning real and gave us a unique experience. Having the hands on learning gave me a better understanding and made me more passionate about the topic we were covering. I’m so fortunate to have been able to work in PLP and learn from the great teachers and students.

To conclude, this Twitter POL has helped me to know what my strengths are and what I could improve on. I can’t wait to see where grade 10 will take me!

I’ve reached my Imagination Destination

Angela on

Yes, it happened! Destination Imagination provincials have come and gone and I’m now left with armfuls of certificates and ribbons!

Incase you are completely lost and have not a clue of what I’m speaking of you may head over to my enlightening blog post where I explain the regional tournament and how we got there. If you really don’t want to read my first post, heres a brief summary of Destination Imagination (or DI for short):

DI is essentially a set of tournaments that teams from elementary schools, high schools, and universities of a region go to compete in their chosen challenge. The teams compete against each other within their age category and the type of the team’s challenge. Every team will have chosen one main challenge, and will be given one “instant challenge” while the team is at the tournament. Depending on the main challenge that the team has chosen, it takes a lot of preparation before the team is able to present it infront of a panel of judges. The instant challenge is somewhat self-explanatory, where the team is given a challenge that’s either performance based, task based, or a blend of both. The team will have a set time to do the task and there will be appraisers judging how the team works together to accomplish the challenge. Of course, with a maximum of 100 points to earn, there are many other factors that the team will be scored on, for example the execution of the challenge, creativity of material use or the creativity of the performance, teamwork and maybe something specific for the certain challenge.

My group had the pleasure of tackling the 3-peat Improve challenge. Now, I’m certainly uncertain that I know what you’re thinking. ‘Angela, you can do improv? No way! I thought you needed to be entertaining and funny to do that!’

Uhhhh…yeah…that’s often a requirement. But you see, I want to take risks! To get the most out of this wondrous, opportunity-filled life! I want to make every second of everyday of every week of every month of every year of every decade, worth while. And so, I put on my big-boy underwear and decided. ‘Maybe, just maybe, I could take a leap of faith,’ Often times, I do “shoot for the stars” but, I’m usually too busy gazing at the moon and end up crashing into a meteorite or something. ​

​So, on the day that my teacher separated us into our DI groups, (mine, consisting of beloved Kate, Willa, Robberto, and Claire) we got our map to the destination of imagination together…more or less. We brought in our 13″ x 13″ x 13″ box of goodies to class like good students and began to ever so slowly bring in props to fill this magic box. But we had even more planning to do! We had to plan out our two Team Choice Elements. Now, I was very thankful and appreciative that we only had to do two team choice elements because I, for one, lack what some may call “skill” which may have been a problem due to the team choice elements being a reflection on something that the team’s “passionate” for. Passion, meaning being good at something or having enough passion to be good at something, and being able to demonstrate it at the DI provincial tournament. But, not all was lost! The amazing grade nine improve group put our almighty heads together and thought up some extraordinary ideas! Because of the group’s passion for music, we had Kate teach Robbie how to play the flute, and we included it in our majestic box o’ stuff. And later, yours truly hand crafted a clay jem which was also included in the magic box. But, not for long my friend. This jem betrayed me and decided to become an almost liquid blob which I was forced to quarantine by putting it into a container and eventually throwing it away forever.

But, do not lose hope just yet! Our dearest Claire managed to keep the ingenious clay idea alive by making new clay and not dumping buckets of water in the formula. So it’s settled then! All that the team will need to do is practice improv skits and games daily with provincials in mind.

DI provincials crept up on us as a predator would do its prey. When the time came to preform our three skits, our team was pretty OK I think. Looking back at the performance, our team definitely performed our best on our first skit, the prompt being that the stock character is working in a car dealership and the stock character was a royal person, our genre was parody. Our group is very experienced in the whole Kim K field and so we had our royal person be the one and only, Kimberly Noel Kardashian. 

All in all, I had a lot more fun doing improv than I did doing fine arts last year. Learning how to improvise and becoming just a tad more experienced made all the difference. In a simple form, t’was pretty good. Stay tuned for further blogposts, where you will hear all about a small moose’s story in a big world.

Given these points, it’s very clear that we all have one question that needs to be answered: Why does a round pizza come in a square box?

Here’s My Canada: A Story

Angela on

Hello and welcome back to my blog. In grade 9 flight we’ve been learn a lot about making videos, such as making a storyboard, plot graph, script, and much more. Our most recent assignment was to create a video explaining what Canada is to us. Click here to visit their official site. The video could be about almost anything, ranging from values, sports, nature, culture, diversity, or history, we could base it off just about anything. In class and in previous assignments, we’ve done a lot of work with plots in stories and our teachers suggested that we could use that to our advantage and base our videos around a story or an experience of ours. At the beginning, I was clueless as to what I could do for my video and was a little worried because the project description was so vague. Luckily, we were able to do some note taking in class about Canada and that gave me a better understanding of what I could include in my video. Here’s a picture of the notes I took:


I watched a lot of the videos that were uploaded in their app which set the bar that I was to not only surpass, but exceed. Our teacher supplied us with the rubric that would be used to judge all the Canada video submissions. Our teachers had us make a few drafts of the video and we were out in pairs to give feedback on the first draft of each other’s videos. Click here to watch my first draft. Here’s a picture of my feedback from Robbie:

Other feedback from Robbie: ” I enjoyed the effects including the lightning and the translation between the kayak flip and the waves however the narrator needs to sound more confident.”

 

As I said before, it was very hard for me to find a story to use in my video. I knew what I’d wanted the story to be based around, I wanted an experience of when a stranger helped another out of pure kindness. Unfortunately, my mind would completely blank when I’d tried to find examples of when this happened to me. I could’ve came up with a story but my imagination is very limited and I really didn’t want to. I proceeded to go around the classroom asking people if them or someone they know ever had an experience where a stranger went out of their way to help them. I’d asked nearly the entire class until Adam told me about how his older brother helped a woman during his paddle board race. The women from the organization seemed to enjoy the story, (at least I hope they did) however because my memory is (most likely) worse than a goldfish’s, I had to read it off my cracked iPad.
I showed the first draft of my video to a few other people, including my classmate and friend named Willa. She enjoyed the video and suggested to add some background music so that the ending of my video would be smoother. For the second draft, I added some background music I got off youtube so that the video could seem more professional. As for the voice over, I redid it many times because my throat was acting up and in most clips it were as if a twelve year old boy that was going through puberty had been narrating my video. It took a lot of editing and research to get the audio just right and the timing perfect for all the clips and effects included. At last, you may watch my glorious, inspirational, and meaningful video.

In summary, I had lots of fun making this short video because I was able to bring in all my ideas and be creative with what to include to represent the story. I liked adding cool effects, such as the lightning sound effect at the beginning and the clip of the kayak flipping over. I’m very happy with how this mini-project turned out and I hope to do more like this in the future. Until the next post, goodbye!

Your Destination is Your Imagination

Angela on


Welcome to my humble abode. Today we’re catching up on the greatness that is Destination Imagination. You can read more about it here. To sum it up in a simple form, it is essentially a tournament where kids form teams and compete against each other in their age groups and challenges. The teams can have a maximum of seven people on them and each team must present their own understanding of the challenge by using a story. The challenges each have a specific task that the team must complete. I was on the improv team and you can watch video about what we had to do here. Every group must also compete in an instant challenge which is basically a challenge with a certain time limit. The teams were scored based on teamwork, creativity, and how well they did the challenge. Our class practiced a lot of instant challenges and my group had a common Kim Kardashian theme. 

Each group is required to have two team choice elements. The team choice elements are meant to shine in your performance and must represent a group’s interest. My group (named Easy 20/20) had Robbie learn how to play the flute in order to represent our passion for music. Our other team choice element didn’t really shine through but I attempted to make the hope diamond out of clay which I’d also made but it ended up being a blue blob in a container. 

Each team competes at regionals and if they qualify will then move on to provincials, which is the qualifying competition for globales. This year, regionals took place at St George’s and at first it was challenging to navigate around the school but it got better as the day went on. At regionals, all the teams needed to be there for 8am and at 8:30 all the groups presented in the gym with their posters. At 9:30 my group watched the grade 8’s present and other than being short on time, did really well. Our instant challenge was at 10:45 and I think we did really well but we could’ve improved on our teamwork. Then at 1:00pm came our challenge, which was very interesting. As you know, we must present 3 skits with the same plot but the stock character and genre changes each time. Our first skit didn’t go too well, to say the least. It was probably the most agonizing three minutes of our lives. The second skit wasn’t bad but there was some room for improvement. Then, we have the third skit. This was the legendary skit that saved our group from last place even though we were the only group competing in our age group. Something we could’ve done differently would definetly be practicing in front of an audience just before the competition to get into the rythme of improv. I think that it went really well in general and you can watch the video of our presentation here. We have provincials in about a month which will be held in Surrey. See you then!

I Like Big Mutts and I Cannot Lie

Angela on

Hey stalker. What’s up? You may’ve noticed that I’ve been blogging a lot recently and I hope that this keeps up. At this point, you’re probably really sick of my puns. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on stopping any time soon with this legendary word play. Just recently, we participated in an event for grade 9s called, “Take Your Kid to Work Day” It’s pretty self explanatory, and I went to my mom’s work. My mom works at a vet clinic and she’s the manager there, so I’ve already been there a few times. When I visited for take your kid to work day, I started off with some cleaning. I cleaned the exam rooms and it was actually a lot of work to do. I had to dust and wash shelves, picture frames, etc. I even washed walls! After some cleaning, my mom had an appointment with someone from a pet insurance company who was telling my mom more about the insurance company and what they offer.

After that, my mom had an appointment with a woman who was fostering a dog that was surrendered by a boy on the streets. The dog’s name is Marley, and he’s up for adoption. I absolutely loved him when I met him and I noticed that he is very energetic and loving. He’s a husky, shepherd, rottweiler mix and they think he’s about six. I really want a dog so I was prying my mom to adopt Marley but she said no:( I think Marley would make a great pet for a family that has a lot of time to take him on walks at least twice a day. Here’s a picture we took as the adoption photo: img_9750

My favourite part of this would be meeting Marley just because I’m an animal lover. I didn’t really dislike any jobs that I did. If anything, when I got home I noticed that I was exhausted. In addition, I wasn’t really passionate about what I was doing here and I don’t think that this might be a career I’d have in the future. However, this did influence me by realizing that when I do get a job, I hope it would involve animals.

Also, I learned a lot about cleaning. As boring as it sounds, it’s actually quite important for any hospital. If a hospital isn’t cleaned properly, there’s the risk of spreading disease. It’s happened before, just not at any of my mom’s places because she and the staff ensure everything’s squeaky clean. 

In summary, I had a lot of fun at the clinic. The staff were really nice and I was able to learn a lot about work in general. I look forward to learning more!