It’s that time of year… tpol time! Tpols are where I get to reflect on the whole year, and what went well, and what went wrong. Let’s just say there were a lot of things that went wrong. And not too many that went right… I decided to organize this tpol around different themes, so I could really reflect on what I learned during this last year. I ended up with 3 themes for this project. What I’m planning on doing for this tpol is to talk about a theme and bring up a few examples of projects that help show what I mean.

Let’s start off with the bad/frustrating. My first theme for today was about what I found hard and/or frustrating with this last year of PLP.  Right off the bat, one new, and slightly off-putting thing was not having any of my really close friends in the program. This was challenging because I had just spent the last year making new friends, and always being with them, and then all of a sudden not having that was pretty strange, and hard to get used to. Another thing that I found really frustrating was that the first projects were extremely hard for me. I think that I wasn’t prepared for the format of learning that PLP has. I was expecting more of an introduction to how we were doing things, but we dove into things right away, and that caught me off guard, leading me to fall behind. It was then really challenging to catch up, which unfortunately set a bad tone for the start of the year that carried on for a while. One main example of falling behind this year was the fall blogging challenge. This was a project that I found really difficult for a few different reasons. I think the main reason was that it wasn’t really assigned by any of my classes, so I was never reminded to do it, or told to at all, and it would slip my mind really easily. Also, I really didn’t like the idea of being told what to write all the time, so not only would I forget about it most of the time, when I did remember, I’d tell myself that I’d do it later, just to forget about it. I think getting another chance to do the blogging challenge this past spring was really helpful because I learned a lot about organizational skills and how I have to write things down if I want to remember to do them.

The next theme that I want to talk about is what I liked about PLP. Despite the frustrations of it, there were some things that I liked about PLP. One of the highlights of the year for me was the field trip to the Oregon coast. I liked how I got to really connect with the other kids in PLP at the beginning of the year, which helped with the problem of not having many friends in the program. I liked the hands-on learning that we did on the trip, especially the interviewing. I also was really proud of the book that I did from the field trip, even though I handed it in a day late and it didn’t end up counting towards my PGP grade. I also enjoyed the exhibitions because we got to really be creative and find our own solutions to problems, which we then presented to lots of other people. The field trips and the exhibitions are two of the strengths of PLP in my opinion.

The third and final theme that I want to discuss is what I learned throughout the last year. One thing that I wanted to do to show what I’ve learned over the last year is to compare an old project, and a more recent project to see what has changed and improved over the last year. The two projects that I chose were the Big Life journal, which obviously wasn’t my favourite project considering I can’t find the blog post for it, as an early project, and the End of the World project. I didn’t choose these two for any reason, but I figured if I changed over the last year, it shouldn’t matter what project I choose. First, let’s talk about the Big Life journal… This was a pretty rough project for me. I really struggled to understand how the milestones and stepping stones worked, and I fell behind quickly. Once I fell behind, it was challenging to get caught back up.  On the contrary though, one of the main things I remember about the End of the World project, is making sure I didn’t fall behind, because it had happened a lot of times before, and it always ended in frustration, or lack of a finished project. Overall, I think this shows a major improvement in my ability to stay organized and on track to complete a project.

The End of the World project also brought together a lot of other things for me. For example, I was more motivated for this project and I found the format more interesting because it was a more creative project. This project was one of the first where I used feedback to make revisions to my work, and in the end the project was better because of that. The project also really showed the value of teamwork, because I had to work in a team and my group was really helpful. We worked well together and in the end our group song was much better than our individual songs. This project was also one of the many that helped me realize that it was really important to read all of the directions and make sure I cover every topic.

In the end, I learned a lot about each of the subject areas throughout my year in PLP. For example, in Humanities, I learned a lot about organization and a strong work ethic so I could keep working on a project until I was happy with it. In Maker, I learned a lot about how I can express my creativity as a learner. In Scimatics, I learned a lot how to stay focused in class (even if it is occasionally boring). For the future, I think I can work on staying organized and focused, and doing what interests me in school.

It’s crazy to think that so long ago someone arrived where we live today and think that this is a new place to live, versus today where there are a ton of people, and many buildings. I think because I am only thirteen, my sense of long periods of time is non existent, so imagining how long ago people first arrived here is not even possible. Anyway, that’s not the point of this blog post. For our last humanities projects of the year, we learned about the history of Canada and New France! It was really interesting to see how far we’ve come, and also how many things are still the same as before. Our driving question for this project was “how can artifacts teach us about settlement, peoples and life in New France.”

Competencies:

 

For this project, we had two main competencies. The first was communicate, with I think I did a good job at. Basically this competency means that you need to put your own thoughts and ideas into your writing and your speaking. I did this well because I was really interested in the turtle effigy that I did my main project on. The second competency was use evidence from various sources. I did this very well because when researching, I only used website that had .gov at the end, and checked on two different websites for everything.

 

Milestones:

 

There were a total of 6 milestones in this project, this blog post being the sixth. To start off, we chose an object that was important to us in the Covid-19 pandemic, and we were given the choice to either write a paragraph, make a video, or make a podcast about our object. I chose my keyboard because I use it every day, and I made a podcast on it. Here it is:

 

IMG_2127

 

Next up, we made a short video about a fictional person in New France, and they needed a role, a job, a birthday, a location, a time, etc. After that, for milestone 3, we researched an artifact, and I researched something called a turtle effigy. Here is a photo of a turtle effigy:

Here is the research I did on it:

 

For our main milestone, we were told to write a 1,000 word story, but we only had 2 days to do it! Luckily I worked really hard and got it done really fast. Lastly, we put the story and the artifact description in a book, as well as adding a title, and an about the author page, and that was our whole project! Here is my finished book!

 

The Missing Turtle Effigy

 

In the end, I think this was a pretty chill, and fun project to end the year on. I am glad that I got to learn about the history of the land I live on because unlike some other projects, it really interests me and learning about it was very fun!

What’s the ideal road trip? The most comfortable, and relaxing road trip ever? The most fun? These were all questions we had to consider in our most recent scimatics project. In this project, The Ultimate Road Trip, we had to plan out a full road trip with a budget of 10,000. When I heard about this, I knew there were a few things I wanted to do. The first one was I wanted to visit my friends in California, so that was my first destination. Next, I really wanted to go to Baja California, for no special reason, just because I felt like it! From then on, it was just random places that I wanted to go to, like LA, Salt Lake City, etc. I thought it would be really cool, but mostly just silly, to rent out a hockey rink and gear everyday. I had to fill in around $2,000 dollars, and I found that renting a rink costs around $200 a day, and my trip was 14 days, so that was perfect.

Competencies:

 

For this project, our core competencies were: reasoning and analyzing, connecting and reflecting, and finally, communicating and representing. The first one, reasoning and analyzing, basically means reasonably estimating, which I think I did pretty well this project. The main reason I think this is because for my total price of my project, I was only around 100 dollars off of the budget! My final price was $9,938. I think my estimation skills were on point with this project because in the first add up of all my costs, I was only 62 dollars off. The next competency was connecting and  reflecting, which was about connecting mathematical concepts to each other and to personal interests. I think that I did this really well because I used my math skills to help me fulfill my interests, like visiting Baja California, LA, etc. Finally, the third competency was communicating and representing, which meant we had to represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms, and I think I did a good job at doing this.

 

Milestones:

 

For this project, there were 6 milestones, this blog post being the last. The first milestone was pretty easy and straightforward. We had to choose a vehicle like a sports car, a truck, and find out how much it would cost to rent it out, and that was pretty much it. I chose an rv, that would cost just under $60 per night, that was extremely big. Now that sounds pretty easy, but that was just a distraction for milestone 2! The second milestone was math practice that may have been long, and slightly boring, it was very necessary, and helpful. After the practice, we had a short quiz on it for milestone 3, and it wasn’t too difficult, although the font was pretty small, and hard to read. The forth milestone is very really starting to work on the project. For this milestone we had to calculate the cost for our road trip. This took not as long as I thought it was because my cost was very close to the budget on the first try. For the 5th milestone, we basically just had to Make an equation for our budget, make a graph for our equation, and then make a map showing our ripped on a dream make an equation for our budget, make a graph for our equation, and then make a map showing our route on our trip. Here is my equation and my graph:

 

And here is my map:

 

Overall, I think that this project was the perfect balance between fun and learning. I had fun, but I also learned a lot, and I’m really glad that we did this project.

For our most recent project, argh matey, we had a joint class with humanities and science. The humanities side was about explorers, and the scimatics side was about viruses and diseases. Doing a joint project was surprisingly nice and helpful because it was the same amount of work but it wasn’t as much to think about.

Scimatics:

For scimatics, our curricular competency was communication. That basically means communicating our ideas, And doing that using proper scientific, finding solutions, etc. For our first milestone we did a mind map. Is my map was showing what we already knew about viruses, and what questions we had. Here is mine:

This is a pretty helpful mile stone because it set off our project with us curious about viruses and diseases. The next mile stone was by far the most fun milestone. We made a disease wanted poster for any disease that wanted. It had to include facts about how many people it is affected, how long have you been around, and more. It was really fun to make because it was almost like you were making a real wanted poster. This is my wanted poster:

 

I was pretty proud with how it turned out! Luckily our teacher knew that we couldn’t have TOO much fun and we had to balance it out with some less fun stuff. We had to do a con Academy lesson and complete the test. As much as this part was boring, it was very helpful for our learning. There’s not much to say about it except for it was really difficult. The last two milestones were combined with humanities, but I’ll get into that later

Humanities

For the humanities part of this project we were learning about explorers. The competency that was being assessed was establish historical significance. This basically means how do we decide what is worth being remembered. For the first humanities milestone, we had a pretty strange one. We were told to watch a movie called Osmosis Jones, which I had no idea why we were watching it at first. It was a movie that had two perspectives. One of a man, and one of blood cell inside of him. It made sense later though, because that’s what we were doing for our comic book. The actual milestone part came when we had to write out the story spine of Osmosis Jones, which wasn’t too difficult. Our next milestone was a comic book analysis chart. Basically, we had to read a bunch of comics, and then analyze them for the mood, the writing, etc. For the last humanities milestone, we had to choose an explorer and then make a chart about them. I chose Hernando De Soto, A Spanish conquistador who explored south east America. This is my chart about Hernando De Soto:

This is a picture of De Soto:

Joint work:

For the joint work part of the project, there were only two milestones. The first one was a storyboard for our comic book. This part was not too difficult but it did take me a little bit of time. I don’t really need to see my storyboard though because you are about to see my final product, my comic book. The comic book took a long, long time. Drawing every frame for the comic book took me almost a week. Some parts of the story were slightly exaggerated or made up because we don’t know everything about every explorer. Here is my completed book!

 

Overall I think this project was really fun and I really got to let out the creativity in me, and I hope I get more fun projects like this in the future!

For our most recent maker project, we had to make a photo essay on our community during the time of covid-19. At first I wasn’t really looking forward to it, but it actually got better as it went on. Earlier this year, we did a project on photography so there wasn’t very much on how to take photos, which I think helped on making this a fun project, because it was pretty short. The first thing that we did for this project was figuring out what we needed to know to do a good essay. This was a pretty fast step, and wasn’t difficult at all. Next, we had to conduct an interview with someone that knows our community really well. I interviewed a family friend that has lived here for around 10 years, and asked her what some of the biggest changes she noticed were, as well as some other questions. Here is the interview:

 

After doing our research, it was time to pitch our idea for our story. This was just a very brief overview of what our stories would be. This is my story spine:

Once our story spine was finished, we had to actually come up with ideas for the shots that we were gonna take, and draw them out. This was pretty straight forward and also fun because I added some funny parts to my story. Here is the storyboard I came up with:

It was finally time to start our project, and shoot the photos that we had planned out. There isn’t much to say about this part except that it went really well and I’m really happy with how it turned out:

Overall, I had a lot of fun doing this project and I’m really happy and proud with how my essay turned out, and it was really cool to be able to witness history and making a photo essay really put into perspective how crazy the circumstances we are facing right now.

For this week in the blogging challenge we’re supposed to talk about school and what our school is like. Obviously right now there’s a global pandemic, so no one’s really at school, but I’m gonna talk about what school is like normally.

I go to high school in Canada, and it’s very similar to school in the US, if not the same. What type of school do you guys go to? My normal day consists of four blocks, each 80 minutes long, a 15 minute break, and a 40 minute break. During those breaks I usually eat food, chat with friends, and the best part of all is that we can leave the school during breaks and I can go to my house or go and get food! My school is pretty small, and there’s only around 500 people there. The school itself has three stories but the top one is pretty small and the bottom one is mostly a cafeteria. We don’t have many special events at our school, because it is a high school, but we do sometimes celebrate holidays, by have parties for them. I used to live in California and I went to a middle school there and it was much bigger than my school here, and had a lot more people, but I like my school here better, because everyone knows each other and it feels more like a community.

That’s all I have to say about my school. I really like my school I think it’s a really good school to learn in! If you want to tell me about your school, feel free to leave a comment about it!

Earth day is on April 22 every year, And is a celebration of our earth, and an appreciation of the planet we live on. The earth doesn’t get enough appreciation, considering that we live on it and have lived on it for our whole life. The point of Earth Day is to give back to Earth, and show it some love!

Currently, we are in a quarantine during this event, so we don’t get to celebrate it as much. Unfortunately, this means not even people realize it is earth day. But I don’t think that we should just forget about birthday because it is one of the most important days of the year! Especially with global warming, we need to look after our planet, so I just wanted this post to make sure you don’t forget about earth day because I think that it’s truly a very important day!

This week for the blogging challenge we had to wright about anything we want, which is actually more difficult than you would think because there’s almost no outline so you have to completely come up with all the prompts yourself. What I want to talk about is Canada only because people have some strange beliefs about Canada. First of all, we don’t live in igloos… Most people don’t think this but I have genuinely heard people think that people in Canada live in igloos, which is entirely false. I live in BC which is one of the most southern parts of Canada so it isn’t ridiculously cold where I live, but in places further north it can get too extremely cold temperatures. People in Canada love hockey as much as people think we do, and it is Canadians main past time. In BC poutine is not extremely common, but in places further east poutine is very popular and most people love it! Although it is very popular, not every single person loves poutine and eats it every day, like some people think we do. I personally likes poutine but don’t love it and because I live in BC I almost never have it. For whatever reason everybody thinks that comedian say sorry every single sentence, but yet that is probably the least factual thing to say. We do say sorry more often than Americans but it’s not something we see in every sentence. When I lived in America people still said sorry almost as much as Canadians, but Canadian say it a little bit more. I didn’t want this to be too long because if I went over every stereotype of Canadians ever, it would take a long time because there are a lot that are false and also a lot that are true. I didn’t want to bore you with a bunch of Canadian stereotypes, so I kept it pretty short. I’ll see you next week, week five!

Hey everyone, this week for our student blogging challenge we had to learn about copyright rules. The first thing I’m gonna do in this blog post is inform are you guys about copyright. When I was much younger I didn’t realize that copyright was a thing and I figured but I could probably just take any image I want and nothing would happen. Now I know that you can’t do that and you definitely shouldn’t do it, because it’s illegal. Looking back on when I didn’t know it was a thing, I realized how silly it would be if there wasn’t such thing as copyright. There are ways to find images that aren’t copyrighted though, and I’m gonna tell you a few of those ways

One easy way of avoiding copyright is to look on Google images, but then click on advanced search and choose labelled for reuse, or if you’re planning to modify it then choose labelled for reuse and modification. Another way is to find a website that has royalty free photos and find a photo that you like. Also you can take your own photos or make your own photos, but I’ll get into that more later. A good source to find copyright free photos is Unsplash.

 

Making my own image.

For making my own image I had a really good idea, but unfortunately one of my photos got deleted or lost and I can’t find it now so it’s less exciting but I still have one of the photos. My idea was to take a photo of my remote for my lights in my room, and then draw a pattern on it with my iPad, and then put it on to the remote using paint markers. The image before I drew the pattern got lost so I no longer have it, but here is a photo of it:

In case you’re not really sure what a light remote is this is what I mean:

It was actually really fun, but at first I was really nervous because I thought I was going to mess it up. After about five minutes I got more comfortable, and I almost forgot I was doing it on something that wasn’t paper and something that I actually use. Anyway, this is a great way to get copyright free photos because there’s no way they will be copyright if you were the one that took the photo.

Copyright free slideshow:

 

For the third task of the blogging challenge, I had to make a slideshow of photos that I found. I got these images on Unsplash. I chose images that I liked and ones that related to me.

 

The first one I really liked because it’s really colourful. The second one I chose because I like basketball a lot. In fact I’m going to go play basketball once I’m done with this blog post! The third one I didn’t really have a reason to put it in, I just thought it looked really cool. The last one I put in because I like flowers a lot and those were really nice flowers so I had to put them in.

 

Poem:

 

For the 4th task, we had to write a poem about a photo we found. If you read my about page (which you should do if you haven’t) you would know that I love hockey. I found a super cool photo on unsplash. As soon as I saw it I thought of a poem! Here is the image:

 

 

The poem I came up with is a couplet, because that is my favourite type of poem! Here is my poem:

 

As soon as he put on his skates

He wanted to be one of the greats.

 

Guess the sentence

 

 

For the fifth and final task we were asked to either add an image and write the start of a story, or make a sentence guessing game. I made a sentence guessing game! It’s basically a series of pictures and you have to guess the sentence they make up in the comments. Here is my sentence:

Can you guess what the says? Good luck solving it and see you next week… free choice week!!!

For the provincial tournament, we had to go on a zoom call with appraisers, and it was nothing like I thought it would be. It was pretty difficult to figure out how to do improv on a zoom call because it’s hard to show where people are on stage with multiple different screens. Originally we had planned to work on our sound effects and our use of the stage for the provincial tournament, because in the regional tournament we didn’t do those things very well. Unfortunately those things were probably the two hardest things to do online. For example, it’s hard to move around on Zoom because you can be on different positions on different people’s screens. Also for the sound effects, you can’t really tell how loud they’re going to be for everybody else. Another thing that we had to work around was cutting each other off, because it’s really hard to tell when other people are talking if you were talking so we had to make sure we didn’t talk while someone else was talking. Speaking about the regional tournament, if you want to see my regional tournament post it’s right here.
The hardest part about all of this was that we had only three days to come up with how we were going to do this online. We had practised for a few months, and then we had to scratch almost all of what we had practised. I think our presentation went pretty well, but it was not as it would’ve been in real life. One thing we did very well is we incorporated everyone into the skit evenly. Here is a photo of us right before our presentation:

 

As you can see,  it would be pretty hard to show movement on the screen as moving on stage. Overall I was pretty happy with our performance considering we only had a few days to adapt to the new way of doing our presentation!