Welcome to the coolest SLC blog post EVER in the history of cool SLC blog posts! Today I will be talking about three examples of my work, one that I am proud of, one that I have learned from, and one that shows growth mindset. I will also touch bases on three goals that I will achieve in the remainder of the school year, and my plan of achieving them!

My first example is my work at the winter exhibition. I am most proud of my work at the winter exhibition! For the winter exhibition, I had to come up with a question about the local environment and research, then answer that question. My question was hard to come up with, but with my fascination of wolves, I thought to base my question around them. I thought back to when I was younger, when I went to Grouse mountain and saw the wolves there. Then I wondered if I could create my question about them. I was all set to start researching my question of how environmental changes were effecting the Grouse mountain wolves, when I found out that they all died:( With that sad information, I was forced to change my question and find a new topic.

When brainstorming, I ended up making a new question that did not include wolves at all, instead it was about deer! To be specific, it was about the deer on Vancouver island and how they were effecting their surroundings. After researching non stop on this concept, I found out some key information like how the deer are giving off a tick, ruining people’s gardens, damaging fences, causing car crashes and costing a lot of people a lot of money. The main concern now was figuring out how to display this information. I thought about a poster but then realized that a poster might be a bit boring. I thought maybe I could do a painting, but I still thought I needed something more, something better. In that moment I remembered at my elementary school, above the hallway was a mural, and I always thought it was really cool and that one day I would make one of my own. This was it, I could display my information on a big long piece of paper in a series of different little paintings, creating one big mural! Once I got the ok from the teachers, it was final.

The first thing I did was get a big long piece of paper and graph out some drawings, showing various things. This took me two classes to complete, and gave me time to research more, and add as I please. This is because I already had the minimum done, and all I just wanted to add were some smaller drawings to fill up the space a bit more. Additional touch ups and extra research took about three classes, now all I needed to do was paint it. That took up the rest of my time in and out of class to finish and dry. I also took a time lapse when I was painting the mural, just to add a little something to my presentation in the winter exhibition.

A lot of the exhibition was also in the decoration of the room. Everybody that had similar questions were put into a a group and were given a sector of the room to set up, decorate, and present in. My group of people were right by the door so we decorated the door and made it look like a landscape with land and sea life, we also put up streamers, but the best thing we did was our island. We used a glass table, covered half in green then left the other half untouched. Then on the untouched side, underneath, we added blue paper to make a bowl shape that would be like you were looking into the ocean. The plan was to add some sea creature plastic figures and fake seaweed in the blue paper and to add fake trees, animal figures, and moss on the land side of the table. When it came time to present, I was so nervous. I thought for sure that people would get bored and not like my presentation at all, but I was surprised when people were interested in what I had to say and by the end of it, it felt more like a conversation than a presentation. I was so proud of all of the hard work and effort that went into this project, and I learned quite a bit about deer, and also quite a bit from watching other people build and present their projects.

A second example of my work, is the work that I did at destination Imagination in the instant challenge. I learned a lot from this, about team work and compromises. For those of you who don’t know what an instant challenge is, it is a challenge where you go in without knowing what the challenge will be. For example, one of the challenges was to build a bridge between two chairs in two minutes, and have that bridge stay up for ten seconds. You could only use the materials provided, and your group had to quickly decide on an idea so there was enough time to actually build the bridge.

At DI (destination imagination), our instant challenge was this. There were many cards on the table and each card had a picture of something on the back, but we could not see it because the cards were flipped over. We had to choose five of the cards that would then be put in an order. The challenge was to tell a story with those five pictures and present it to the appraisers (people who judge the performance), and we got extra points if you presented them in the order they were put in. The pictures that were on the five flipped over cards were a hola hoop, doughnuts, a snorkel, a telephone, and a hammer. Me and my group quickly decided on the story line, which would be about a guy who got a telephone call from his friend that wanted to go snorkelling. Then they went and found an under water cavern filled with doughnuts, and used a hammer to get them out. After that, one of them got stuck, but they had to get out quick because a sea monster was coming, so they used a hola hoop to pull him out and they swam away with their doughnuts.

We ended up winning first place in our instant challenge, mostly because we all worked exceptionally well together, and we used the materials in a creative way. We were given a piece of paper and a pencil, and with that, we made an ocean background and the mouth of a scary sea monster. In practicing and completing many instant challenges, I learned vary much about myself and how to be a good team member without taking charge of the whole thing. I also learned a lot about the way the other kids in my group worked, especially under pressure. I feel like we did very successful in this challenge.

A third example of my work, is an example from a field study that I did when my class went to the Oregon coast. We visited the Hatfield marine science centre and did some fun work there. The first thing we did was walk out to the beach. It was quite wet and cold but I had a fun time anyways. We used these cool thing called shrimp slurper and walked around the beach looking for holes in the sand. We then dug into the hole with the shrimp slurper and sucked up some live shrimp. It was very cool and interesting to do.

We then took them back to the lab and analyzed them to see what type of shrimp they were, their gender, length, and weather or not they had a parasite. They would then documented our data, that would then be used by others who were researching the topic. At first I thought that it was a little bit scary that other scientists would be using data that a bunch of high school kids found, but then I forced my self to have a growth mindset and remember that although i am not a scientist, that doesn’t mean that my information is not valid and that even scientists are constantly learning new things, just like I am.

The last thing I will talk about are my three goals. My first goal being to get more comfortable with the fact that you are not always going to get everything right. I feel that I am well on my was to achieving this goal and have a plan on how to get this outcome. I am going to try my best to put up my hand, even if I end up being wrong. I starting to realize that it is ok to be wrong, as long as you learn from that mistake. My next goal is to get better at time management. I plan to achieve this by forcing myself to set aside at least fifteen to thirty minutes (or more) after school to catch up on homework, or just to review what I have learned. My third and final goal is to get homework in on time. This has been a struggle for me in the last few weeks but my plan is to treat a due date like the end of the world if I don’t hand in my work. But even if I do hand it in late, it is better than not handing it in at all.

This was my Student-Led-Conference post, I hope you liked it! Have a cool day, cooler than the coolest bean in the freezer! Cool beans, get it? Ok sorry i’ll stop now.😎