Hi everyone and welcome back to another school blog post quarantine edition. In this unit we thought of, planned, researched, and executed a call to action to help our earth. That’s right we became environmentalists from our very own bedrooms. Now to some people that might sound boring or impossible to make change from home, but do not worry we pulled it off and had a great time doing it. Each person picked a problem they wanted to solve to help our environment then made our solution and picked a tool to help us get our message across. For me I chose the issue of constant air pollution from cars so I made a website discussing the solution of free transit for minors. I explain it on the website but the idea is that if kids grow up riding the bus for free they’ll take it for granted and continue to ride the bus more as they grow up. More people on the bus means less cars on the road and the air is being less polluted.

CLICK THIS LINK TO GO TO MY WEBSITE!!!!

The two core competencies we focused on in this unit were connect and ethical dimensions. For the connect competency we were supposed to show our understanding of connecting texts and other things we learn about to our own lives or other things we interact with. I fell like my novel study reflections were a great example of this. For this unit we read The Golden Spruce and each week had to make a reflection with a different role. Now obviously my connector role showed off this skill very well but I believe my other reflections used connection as well. To really understand what I was reading I would be constantly visualising or connecting the story to things I’ve experienced in my head. I also think in our zoom chats about the book I was very involved in connecting things.

MY CREATIVE CONNECTOR REFLECTION

The ethical dimensions competency is about deciding if decisions made in the past were correct/ethical/just and if they should’ve been made. I covered this competency right away with our first milestone of this project, the current event. For this we were supposed to do some research about something in the news from the past 5-10 years to do with climate and agree with it or not. I decided to look at when Vancouver took out a lane of the Burrard Bridge to replace it with a bike lane. At the time people thought it would be a complete failure and add traffic but now 10 years later and it’s the most used bike lane in North America. I also somewhat went over this competency in my website as well however I mainly talked about plans for the future and less about the reasons why we got to this point of terrible air pollution from cars. By talking about the future I could keep an optimistic tone instead of sounding very sad.

The final part to this project was the exhibition. Yep you heard me right, despite social distancing orders and everyone staying at home PLP still managed to hold an exhibition. The entire thing was run over a zoom call where groups of grade 8s, 9s, and 10s presented their projects in a story like manner. That probably sounds confusing but I’ll explain. At the beginning if the project we were asked to pick which area of environmentalism we’d like to work on. There was consumption, home, public, economic inequities, climate and energy, and the water. My project fell under public as it was about public transit. The grade 10s had no clue this was happening until 1 week prior to the exhibition we were told we’d be working with the younger grades to do an exhibition over zoom. The idea was in our groups to come up with an interactive story that we could perform for an audience on zoom while keeping them engaged and showing our projects. My group started by planning a day in the life but it was shot down for being too boring. We then decided that our story would be someone watching a series of infomercials and the audience could say if they liked the product or not. It was a stressful week but we pulled it off.

This project for me didn’t start off fantastic. I got some bad personal news in the first week and due to that stopped doing all school. After about a week I started to get stressed out and was upset with myself for not doing work. So I decided one afternoon to try and catch up on everything or get as close to be up to date as I could. Doing this actually felt really good and for the rest of the project I stayed on top of everything. Despite what was going on in my life I was able to produce a website I’m super proud of as well as lead an exhibition group and complete most of the milestones. To me my website is the best thing I did this whole project. I was super passionate about what I was researching so I spent tons of time gathering information and it was so cool to me that I would tell me family the new things I learned. Also using Wix was super fun because

My website logo

the website looked so professional. While it was annoying at times picking out every single detail it totally paid off because to me that website is amazing. Making this website meant I really worked on my creativity and writing skills. If my text and design ideas weren’t good then the website would’ve looked childish and messy. I think despite being proud of my website and catching up I liked this project because I felt like I was doing the world some good. With everything going on in the world right now feeling like you’re doing something to help feels very powerful. Coming up with a possible solution to a worldwide problem was pretty awesome to say the least.