Monthly Archives: June 2019

Jun
23
2019

There was a Blue Sky Yesterday

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Hello there and welcome to my last blog post this year. This post is about blue sky. If you don’t know what we do for blue sky click here to read my last blue sky post.

Just like last spring exhibition we followed the launch cycle to create our projects. The launch cycle is a very useful acronym that stands for; L. (Look, listen, learn) A. (Ask tons of questions) U. (Understand the problem) N. (Navigate ideas) C. (Create a prototype) H. (Highlight and fix). If some of the letters meanings are unclear watch this video to get a better understanding of the cycle.

L – Look, Listen, Learn

This is the brainstorming phase. We were given prompt questions and tasks that would help us decide what to make. In this phase I decided to create a mind map to plot out my ideas. You’ll notice that my idea isn’t on this mind map.

A – Ask Tons Of Questions

In this phase we had to ask questions about our idea. By this time I still hadn’t come up with an idea yet. But I made a timeline so that once I had an idea I already layed out a plan to comeplete it.

U – Understand the Problem

It was right around here that our project pitch forms were due.  Fortunately I had finally come up with an idea. My idea was to make a napkin box for tissue to reduce the amount of tissues that parents had to pick up from their little child. I completed the pitch form and soon after interviewed my grandma for her input on my idea.

N – Navigate Ideas

This phase was about organizing my ideas. The idea of this phase was to help you sort your ideas out if you had a lot. Unfortunately for me I already had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do so this phase is hard to show. I used post it notes to help organize the few different ideas I had.

C – Create a Prototype

We were supposed to do 5 different types of prototypes but my time management was quite off and I had some major things back up. So I didn’t get around to doing this stage until 2 days before the exhibition. So I only had time to create 1 prototype and fix it the next day.

H – Highlight and Fix

This phase was the final one before presenting my product to a live audience. The only major change was that I added ribbon to the box to make sure it stayed closed when you would withdraw napkins from it.

 

Night of

As with all exhibitions we were put into groups based on our products. We had to have a running theme throughout our area that tied in with all of our projects. I was put into the home products section. We attempted to turn the hallway into a house and our project were all supposed to be the different rooms of the house. I say attempt because it did not go good at all. But it wasn’t that bad as we had the best food out of everyone there and our projects mattered more then our room theme.

If you would like to see my launch portfolio, the thing I presented on the night of the exhibition it is right below.

Reflection

It definitely helped this year having 3 exhibitions of experience under my belt as we also had to take charge and lead the gr. 8’s in the setting up of our rooms. I once again need to manage my time better as I should of made more prototypes. All in all I thought this blue sky was the best one yet.

Thats all for now. See you next year!

-Emerson

Jun
21
2019

WW1: The Aquatic Front

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Hello there and welcome to my final humanities post for this year. This will also be my last humanities post for a long while as I am leaving the program. But I will probably come back for gr. 11 if it runs. Regardless I hope you enjoy this post about WW1.

In this unit we made a video about a specific topic in the category of WW1. This project was a lot more open ended then our other video projects. As we could pick the style of video we use. Regardless we still had a lot to do before we even chose our form.

One of those things was the novel study we had to do. To help us get a better understanding of the scale of WW1 we had to read a book.

There were 3 books that we could choose from. Warhorse, Generals die in bed, and Private Peaceful. I chose to read Warhorse as it sound the most appealing to me.

Warhorse is about the main character Joey who is a horse. He gets sold to the army where he goes on a epic journey to find his owner Albert. I can’t say much more without spoiling the book.

To show that we read the book we had to complete a role sheet each week and participate in book chats with other people who read the same novel.

I did not really like that we had to fill out role sheets about the book. I understand why we have to do it but I don’t like it. I would much prefer if we could talk about the book for a while. That would be much more interesting.

After we finished our books we had to do a final book reflection. There were 5 different options. I chose to do a photo essay. Before you go any further my reflection contains spoilers for the book. So you have now been warned.

While we were reading the book the more important part of this unit was taking place. That was the creation of our videos.

Our videos were required to have many things. Some of them were; an intro, music, and works cited. My topic was the War at Sea. I followed 5 main steps to make my video.

First I had to research my topic, the War at Sea. The research would become my base of the video. It also helped me understand what happened at sea during WW1.

 

Then came the video pitch form. Now that we had an idea about our topic and what story we were going to tell we could now pitch our video styles to Ms. Maxwell. I decided to go with the Indy Nidel style video. I picked this video style because I didn’t really like the other options. I hate drawing so an animation was off the table, and I have no idea how to make a stop motion.

 

Next I moved on to writing my screenplay. This stage is very important as this is where I decided what I’m going to say. It was important that I do this stage and not procrastinate it because it made filming the video a lot easier.

 

The last planning stage we did was the storyboard. This was helpful as it helped me plan out what I was going to film and what it would look like.

 

After all that I moved on the most important stages, filming and editing. I made many drafts for this video. I even had to change sets and re-film most of it. Here is my final video that I presented to the students at Cove Cliff.

Now let’s look into how I got there. To film I had to get my mom to help. My first draft was on a different set. Take a look.

As you can see the set was drastically worse and I didn’t have an intro or music. I also didn’t have a lot of images  to break up the face. This resulted in a pretty boring video. Using the feedback I quickly made a 2nd draft.

In this draft I re-filmed the video and added in more images. I did not have time to make an intro or add music for this draft but I put it in for the final one.

I only made 3 versions of this video mainly because of the time crunch I was on. Normally for a video we make at least 3-4 drafts before our final product. However as I said before we also went to Cove Cliff (an elementary school close by) to present our videos to a live audience.

Me at Cove Cliff showing kids my video.

 

Reflection 

This unit was a great way to end our humanities year. I learned lots about Indy nidel style videos and how to film/edit them. If I were to re-do this project I would definitely give myself more time to edit the video and add things like music and an intro earlier so that I can make less drafts. I loved the fact we got to go and present our videos to a live audience as it helped make sure the video was something I was proud of because I had to show it to people I don’t know.

Anyways humanities this year was great. I have one more post to do so stay tuned.

-Emerson

Jun
19
2019

TPOL’S!!

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Hello there welcome to my second ever tPOL. For those of you that don’t know a tPOL is a lot like an mPOL except we reflect on the second half of the year and talk about why we should be allowed to continue PLP. With that said lets get into it.

Humanities

First I am going to talk about humanities. We have done many great units this year and the information that I learned this year will stay with me for the rest of my life.

This year I learned a ton about filming and editing. The most important skill I think I learned was definitely the rule of thirds. I also now have a lot of respect for the film crew behind every movie, tv show, and animated cartoon because now I truly understand how much work it takes to make them.

My favourite humanities project this year was definitely the heritage minute unit that we did about confederation. I really enjoyed this unit for many reasons. The first was the video form. I really enjoy group skits, because my acting is not very strong so I don’t have to be the centre of the film. I much prefer to film and edit videos so I can do that instead. It’s not just that I also really enjoyed the topic we were learning about.

The unit I disliked the most this year was probably the unit about animation. This unit was especially hard for me because I am a very bad artist and hate drawing. So the fact that we had to make a 2-3 minute animation frame by frame was terrible. This is probably my least favourite unit that I’ve done since the start of gr.8. If the video hadn’t been animation based I would of enjoy this unit very much as I like to learn about history and famous people.

Overall I learned a lot about video skills and editing. I enjoyed this year of humanities a lot better then last year. Next year I am looking forward to learning about WW2.

Scimatics

We did many very intriguing things this year in scimatics. But I would like to focus on one part that I really enjoyed.

This year in scimatics I really had fun and learned a lot about biology. My favourite unit in science this year was definitely the clone army. This was the unit where we grew clones of plants and then chopped them up to find mitosis. This unit really stood out to me as I found the cells very interesting to look and learn about.

Maker

Next we have Maker, I would say that I took the most risks in the class compare to any other. Mostly because of DI. In DI this year I took a big step/ was force into it by my group. That step was playing the main character in our performance at provincials. As I already said I dislike acting very much as I feel uncomfortable talking/performing in front of others. So being forced into a major acting role I would say helped me become more comfortable with acting as practice makes perfect.

PGP

This is the course that I struggled the most in this year. Everything I handed in was late and it wasn’t my best work. This course was definitely my weakest subject. I think this is because of my lack of use of some helpful apps such as things. I am going to re-do my time blocking so that it is easier for me to see how much time I have each day. This year of PGP really helped me plan out what I want to do and where I want to be. Next year will be the year where I now start getting to my destination.

Conclusion 

This year I did very well in most subjects. In some however I definitely struggled. I plan to do a lot better in some courses mainly PGP by using the tools that help me better manage my time. From my mpol to now I haven’t really improved but I plan for major changes for next year. This summer will help me a lot as I have much planned. I’m going to start working at a job which will help with my overall awareness of time. I think I am ready for PLP 10 because I have grown a lot. My video skills at the beginning of the year were sub par but they have improved greatly from then. Even though my time management still isn’t great I have a plan to improve it for next year.

Jun
04
2019

PGP? Plus a Time Machine?

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Hello and welcome to one of my last gr.9 blog posts. In this post we will be talking about PGP the new outside of timetable course!

PGP this year was divided up into 3 sections. Goals, productivity and the 7 habits. We met once a month after school to discuss how we were doing with the assignments. Personally I didn’t like this course as it was quite a bit more work, but mainly because it was outside the timetable because who likes staying after school?

We started off the year talking about goal setting. We read this book called What Do You Really Want by Beverly k. Bachel. We had to fill out the forms (worksheets) in the book into a journal and submit them. This was my least favourite part about PGP because I don’t really like to get personal about what I want to do and all that.

We then moved on to the productively section of PGP. In this part we learned a lot about how to be productive and ways to stay on task, as well as given tools to stay on top of work. We learned about time vampires. Those are the people/ apps/ sports/ pretty much anything that distracts you. We also learned about time blocking. Time blocking is a very useful tool that will help a lot if your like me and struggle to get work done on time. To time block just open calendar on your mobile device and put in blocks of time. I block mine by the hour. Then you know when to work, play and when you have time to go out and hang with friends.

What my time blocking looks like

The other part of productivity was a tool that we got, Things. Things is a very useful app. You just add stuff into things and set a due date, then Things will send you reminders and even put it into your calendar. It’s a really great app that I would recommend to anyone. It also has a ton of tutorial videos, so if you get stuck you can just go watch one of them. It’s also compatible with just about anything. iPad, phone, or computer Things will run.

The final unit we did this year in PGP was the 7 habits. The 7 habits are 7 great habits that are almost a necessity. If you develop these habits then you’ll be golden for the rest of your life.

1. Be proactive

2. Begin with the end in mind

3. Put first things first

4. Think win-win

5. Seek first to understand then to be understood

6. Synergize

7. Sharpen the saw

If you want to know more about the 7 habits, feel free to look it up or I suggest reading Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey.

For the end of year project In this course we had to make… a time machine! The idea behind this project was, what was something that you know now that you wish you knew at the start of the year. For me I didn’t really know where I wanted to be at the beginning of the year so I decided to focus on Habit 2.

I ended up making an infographic for my artifact.

That was PGP this year. I hope you enjoyed.

-Emerson