Hello everyone! 

Welcome back to my blog! I hope you have been doing well since the last time I posted about my Scimatics project. However, this post will not be about Scimatics, it’s going to be about my most recent project in Humanities. In the past five weeks, we have been hard at work on a singular letter that is going to an authority figure (they’re being sent today!). We had many drafts, many failed attempts, and in the end, an awesome final letter. This project was about an environmental topic that you felt strongly about. I picked plastic pollution as my topic. I really liked this project because I thought that we got to educate our peers, teachers, and the general community about an important issue. Anyhow, happy reading!

Driving question: How do people and the environment affect each other?

Answer: People affect the environment by taking natures resources and using them to make tools and other necessities. There can sometimes be devastating side effects though like plastic pollution and climate change. The environment affects people by giving up resources for humans to thrive off of.

This project started off on that fateful day, September 8th. On that day, we were introduced to our table group. This group would be where we would come back to bounce ideas off of each other. They all helped me in different ways and I just want to take a moment to thank them all. 

Now, moving on to the actual project. This assignment was a little different from the Grade 8 ones as it only had three Milestones instead of six. We also used a website called CommonLit as a third source of building knowledge. We used CommonLit a few times last year in Grade 8, but I feel in Grade 9, we learned how to use it more effectively and we dove deeper into the program. 

We started off this project by picking a topic. Some people chose the B.C. Wildfires while others chose waste management. Each person picked a topic that they were going to research and pitch to the teachers. I chose plastic pollution as my topic because it’s something that affects me everyday when I walk by garbage on my way to school. Once you had picked your topic, you had to research it, cite your sources, and come up with one questions that you would ask the teachers. Mine was helping me pick a target audience (who we were writing to). I was a little bit stuck here, but Mr. Harris suggested that I write to the head of the bottling manufacturing at Coca-Cola. This seem like a good idea at first, but then I realized it was much to broad (no hate Mr. C). In the end, I decided to write to The Honourable George Heyman who is the minister of environment and climate change strategy. 

Throughout this project, I made a whole bunch of drafts for my letter. I made some that were questionable now that I go through and read them again, but I also made some that weren’t actually that bad. Each time I made edits to my letter, I had something else in mind. Whether it was grammar, making my call to action more clear, or making my evidence stronger. I really like the way my final letter was structured. I think I had a good introduction to my environmental issue, as well as some strong evidence to support it. I also really like how I cited my evidence and used direct quotes to make myself sound fancy. Furthermore, I liked how my call to action was clear, concise, and over all very direct.

I think a good piece of my learning was the CommonLit actives. I think that this is definitely where I got the most knowledge out of this project. I learned about using evidence and citing your work. I learned about themes and how to connect them to other pieces of writing. I also learned some new vocabulary words that were very useful in my final letter to make me sound smart! I tried my best on all of the CommonLit activities and my overall average was 83.33% which definitely needs some working on. I think that it would be fun to do this project again and see if I could get a better mark, but that idea is for a different time.

Another assignment that I think shows my learning was the CommonLit connections. This is where we showed our skills that we learned through CommonLit. It’s where we demonstrated our ability to connect themes with stories to our final letters. I liked this activity because I thought it showed my growth as a learner. I also think I did a really good job identifying and connecting the themes. I feel like all of the long and tedious work that I spent on the CommonLit activities eventually paid off when I got a rainbow 🌈 on that Milestone. 

In this project, I learned how to do many things. I learned how to do successful research and how to properly find sources. I learned how to address a letter with the proper sizing and formatting. Moreover, I learned about a lot of different people and their roles in the government. Specially Megan Curren and Dennis Thomas. I feel like this project was a good start to the year and got our creative juices flowing for the projects to come. Thank you for reading this post!

Best wishes,

-Dana

P.S. Here is pic of our class sending our letters. In the cold, wet, soggy rain.

P.P.S Here’s an interesting YouTube video that I found on my topic