Monthly Archives: January 2018

Jan
25
2018

MPOLS or SLC

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Being in PLP we have to do two SCL’s (student lead conferences) a year. Because I am in Gr.8 this year this is my first one. A SLC presentation is about 12 minutes long. 7 of those minutes are for me the student to talk all about the stuff I’ve learned this year and what to do better for the rest. The other 5 are for the parents and the teachers to ask me questions about my work, learning, and presentation.

What I did great

My favourite thing we’ve done all year is the religion unit because religion has always been one of those things that where your curious about it but you don’t know where to start because their are some many differ religions. Another reason I loved that unit is because we got really good critique from my classmates, Ms. Willemese, and some advice from Mr. Hughes.

To read the entire worldview and religion post click here.

Another one of the things I’m proud of is the Star Wars exhibition. Although it was a lot more in-depth than any of the other projects that we have done so far I really liked it after it was over, because while it was going on I was stressed like crazy. But I was ready for the day of the presentation and one of the biggest things I learned is that procrastination is not good at all.

The frustrating work

There was only a couple of the big things that got me frustrated so far this year. One was the advertising unit because I kept rushing through each draft and ended up having to do 18 different drafts. Now because of that learning experience I learned that speed isn’t always the best, and that I should slow down when doing assignments because I might miss something or come up with an even better idea.

Some of the ad drafts that I did.

The other was the door is a bore project in math. It was really fun but really frustrating because we didn’t check each other’s calculations so we end up almost having to restart after 2 weeks of hard work. But we used our problem solving skills as well as some help from Ms. Klausen to figure out a solution. To read the full story click here.

The bad stuff

The worst piece of work that I have done this year was probably the growth mindset unit in maker. The reason I think this is because I procrastinated a lot of the work in that unit, mostly because it was the start of the year and because I over estimated my abilities.

Myself as a learner

Now reflecting back on the year so far and the rest of the year to come I have a bunch of things that I’m going to change and somethings that I’m going to keep. A couple of things that are going to change are I’m not going to procrastinate every thing I’m going to get everything I need to get done done before it gets to late. Another thing I’m going to change is I’m not going to over estimate my abilities. Some things that I am not changing are reading, staying in PLP.

Thats all for this post till next bye😀😀

Jan
24
2018

My door is a bore no more!!

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So this post is a little different than the other posts. This one is about math!! Now this is the first blog post about math but it’ll still be great. So here we go.

The start of the first project we did in math was a lot of what we did in humanities. But first the project, to turn increase the door belows surface area by five using shapes.

 

After we got the assignment we were divided into groups of four my group was composed of Jordyn, Paisley, and Luciano. Our first step was to do our calculations on how much surface area we needed and what shape we needed to make. After making a ton of calculations we decided to go with a triangular prism with the dimensions of, height of 40 cm, length/depth of 26 cm, and width of 24 cm. But then disaster struck, the paper wasn’t big enough for our measurements. Then we got an idea. We could just half the measurements and double the amount of shapes we would make. So instead of 6 shapes we made 12 that looked like this.

But then after spending 320 minutes making them we taped them to the door and found out the our calculations were way off!!!!!!! 😭😭😭. So then it was time to put our problem solving skills to the test. We were just under half way to the surface area that we needed to achieve. Then we had a brilliant idea 💡 we could open up the tops of the shapes and that would double our surface area. So we did but we were still short about 90 cm2 so we made a little cube to go on as well.

After you do a building task you have to write a technical report on everything that you did and what you would do differently. So my groups is right here.

Now if you read it says that are percentage error was -0.005% which means we went over by 0.005. The reason why is because the side lengths of the cube was some how changed by 1 more then it was suppose to be and the error was so small it doesn’t really matter.

The final door with all the shapes from all the groups was quite spectacular, as it had all different colours and shapes.

Refection time 😀

Now after doing the entire project I have increased my understanding of shapes and surface area. One of the key things I learned is that never let just one person do the calculations and just agree with it, because if we had checked our calculations before we started making the shapes we would of known that our calculations were off.

So that’s all for this blog post hope you have great rest of your day and thanks for stopping by to read this.

Jan
12
2018

A religious worldview

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Just before the break ended we were studying religion and worldview in humanities.

Now if you are reading this as a religious person please don’t feel offended if the information is incorrect because I only really focused on the Muslims so please don’t get mad.

So now onto the interesting part. We started of with us being put into groups of four. My group was composed of Sam, Gabby, and Fraser. Then we learned one very key vocabulary word for this unit. Worldview- a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. It can then be divided into seven main categories geography, knowledge, economy, values, society, beliefs, and time.

Once we had that all down we went into the religion part. First we were tasked with making a world religion chart about all the religions.

While that was going on we also had to create infographics about a specific religion the groups were Christianity, Islam, Jewdism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. My group had rotten luck and got the muslims. Now wait I am not saying that the Muslims are bad, the reason is because we had to ask an Imam questions 2 days after we got the assignment.

So that was the next part we went to the each of the religions gathering places and each group had to interview the leader to understand more about that religions worldview. So now we have a script that we were going to follow but of course I messed up and we had to scrap it. But I’ll still put it in because why not.

So then we started focusing on our infographic. As well as going on 4 other field trips to see the other religions.

The mosque

The synagogue

The Hindu temple

The Christian church

The Buddhist monks

The Sikh gurdwara

Then my group of Gabby, Fraser, and Sam stared focusing on the infographic.

This was our first draft that we made. It was made in keynote don’t know why but that’s why it’s sideways. So its really bad but its a first draft so don’t judge.

So now we changed to pages and changed a lot of stuff. The background the colour and icons are all new from the last draft.

So this is our third draft and all we did was change one colour.

At last we came out with this amazing beauty. It’s easy to read and understandable. We changed the  flow of the page. And added lots of icons plus some fun facts.

Now we had groups for all the religions we study except Hinduism sorry but here are their info graphics.

Thanks for reading

-Emerson