Category: Science

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!

Morris the Moose Goes to School

Angela on

Hello, welcome to my blog! Today I’ll be sharing with you a long lost tale about a Frankenstuffie. This little guy was a creation part of the “Who’s in Control: People or the Environment?” unit we’ve done in PLP. We’ve worked on this unit for a huge chunk of the year and we’ve been very busy bees. To start it off, we read Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ and filled out sheets that asked questions like, “Who is in control in this section of the novel: the humans or the environment? Justify your answer with at least two examples from the book.” We would read a handful of chapters every week and fill out these sheets as a reflection to the section we read. Here’s an example of one of the sheets we filled out.

 

 

This reflects on the very last few chapters in the book (Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!) where Mark makes his way to return to his team on the Ares 2 mission. He gets there safely and everyone is happy. But as you can see on the sheets, there are still a few unanswered questions that are driving me crazy. This book had an interesting style because it would include different perspectives from different characters/groups of people. We were introduced to that style of writing so that incase we wanted to include something like it in our epistolary story, we’d have the option.

To give you a better understanding of the epistolary stories, it was basically entries we wrote about the whole story arc of our creature and its adaptation to this new change to its physiographic region. Meaning, the environment changed and so the animal had to change in order to adapt to it. We were first given a place with a certain climate around Canada and my group was assigned the Prairies. I chose to do the SouthEast Prairies and brainstormed what I could put into my story. Here’s a picture of the storyboard I came up with:

After making the storyboard for the epistolary story, it was time to get writing! We did drafts of our epistolary stories and after finishing them had our peers critique them, giving us feedback.

For my epistolary story, I wrote it in a way that Morris the Moose would be writing letters to a friend who’d gone traveling. I went for an older style of writing and was inspired by the language and expressions included in the letters sent in the time period during WW2. I got my inspiration from the letters on this website and found it to be quite easy to adapt to that writing style. Here’s my final epistolary story:

If you read my epistolary story that i’m so proud of, you’ll notice the antagonist. This was a monster we made as a part of a math project and it was really fun to put together.

The final part of this project was the video. Our videos were based off of our epistolary story but we were allowed to change a few things. Here’s a picture of the storyboard for my video:

In the end, I didn’t include the antagonist because I just thought it would be a simpler and easier to comprehend if there weren’t any complications with the characters. In its place, I took the environment struggles to a new level and they went on for a long time. Here’s my video:

https://youtu.be/1FRejfJZvdg

I’m a Mad Scientist

Angela on

We’ve seen some very fascinating things in science this year, but this lab has been one of the coolest. Pretty much we mixed some things, we poured some things, we shook somethings, and we changed the colour of a flame. But that’s not the very in depth or detailed description that’s expected of me in the plp program, so prepare to witness the tutorial to teach you how to be a magical science geek. 
You will need to begin by making sure you have all the right materials. We used two 500ml beakers, a graduated cylinder, safety goggles, copper chloride, a bunsen burner, some paper towel and aluminum foil. To ensure maximum safety, put on the safety goggles. Once maximum safety is ensured, fill one of the beakers with copper chloride. Following suite, add the aluminum foil and let it sit for a couple minutes. If you’re patient, you’ll likely notice a chemical change in which the foil changes to a rustic, dark brown colour. Bubbles rising to the surface, a subtle smell, and of course the new rusty substance are also indications of the chemical change that has occurred. 

When the elements slowly begin to come apart, pour out the copper and wash the beaker and contents a couple times. To wash it, fill it a little with water, let it settle for awhile and then pour it out. This will ensure the copper is as pure and clean as can be. After that magnificent step, add chloride and do yet another wash with that. Scrub-a-dubdub. Then, scrap the aluminium from the bottom of the beaker and pick it up with your pair of tongs. Using the tongs to pick up a little bit of the material, hover it over the Bunsen Burner which will magically transform a blue flame into a green flame. 

Congratulations! You’ve just completed the experiment based around the equation CuCl2+Al=Cu+AlCl3. You get a gold star. 

I’m Batman

Angela on

Hey there my dood how you doing? In science we’ve been working really hard on our newest project, the Super Hero project. We were put into groups of 4 or 5 in a mix of girls and boys.  In order to do this group project we need to know a thing or two about the Periodic table so that’s more of what we’ve been studying. We also made a big poster of the periodic table which includes all the groups, elements, atomic number, charge, symbol, names, and so on. We’ve done a few worksheets and notes which included information and activities to help us learn about elements, atoms, and the periodic table. My group has all been working on a 3D model of the atom of our choice.  The model we’re all making is based on the Bohr version of the atom and we chose to make a model of the Phosphorus atom. We were given some class time to work on the atoms and it wasn’t very difficult to make the base of the model. We used thick wire, white styrofoam balls, and a little bit of clay for the base. We began making it by using a bigger styrofoam ball in the centre to act as the nucleus. On the next shell (the one closest to the nucleus), we placed two small styrofoam balls to represent the electrons. We placed eight more on the next election shell and seven more electrons on the valence shell (the shell that holds the electrons the farthest away from the nucleus). Once we were all finished the layout I twisted the wires together so that they’d stay and Claire and I hot glued everything together so that everything would stay put and wouldn’t fall apart. We did such a great job one could say we make a MARVELous pair. Me, being the clumsy person I am, hot glued my thumb and because the glue was so hot I immediately ripped the glue from my skin…bad idea. My thumb had many layers of skin torn from it and I had no idea what to do so I put on a band-aid and hoped for the best. Tomorrow, my group plans to do some decorating to the atoms but I don’t think I’ll be allowed to touch the glue gun at all…

Well that’s all and I know that you’re just FURYous that this is over but don’t worry there’ll be a WHOLE LOT MORE to come in the near future! And for my thoughts on this project, I’ve Loki got to say that I THORoughly enjoyed it and I hope my teacher will assign us more like this in the future.