Tag: socialstudies

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

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!