Today is the day where I give a conclusion to the year, and get to share with you the reasons why I feel I am ready to move on to grade nine. Throughout the year I have grown a lot, not just as a learner, but as a person. Through my many activities and classes i have grown confident in both myself and my work. At the beginning of the year I was more of a quiet, keep to myself kind of person. It’s only fair when you find your self at a new school that is so much different than elementary. It was a little scary at first, but now elementary school seems boring compared to the wonderful freedom of high school.
Each different class teaches me not only the concept, but how to be a more efficient and effective learner. Some examples are shown in work done from my different classes
Scimathics (science and math class): in scimathics we have done many amazing projects such as our door project, and our minecraft project. I feel that the one project that I have grown from the most would have to be my most recent exhibition. This science light exhibition required me to choose one of the many subjects to do with light. I chose the topic of bioluminescence. Within my group, all of the group members had to choose a subtopic, and I decided to choose how how bioluminescence was used underwater. Made a poster explaining all of the different functions of bioluminescence and how it was used, and I also helped with an experiment using live bioluminescence bacteria. This project helped me grow as a learner by not only showing me how to be a more confident speaker when presenting, but also taught me some good work habits like breaking up your work and knowing what you want to accomplish on what days. I very much enjoyed this project. I loved seeing the bioluminescence bacteria because they are so interesting, and I also loved sharing my knowledge with all the people that came to the exhibition and seeing how they were actually quite fascinated with what I had to say.
Humanities: humanities has been the most busy class and has given me many interesting projects such as our sales pitch, Julius Caesar body biography, and our comic. There are so many that it is hard to choose just one that I have learned the most from, I have learned a lot from them all. With that said there is one that stands out a bit more than the rest and that was my notebook about how epidemics fuelled medical advances throughout the ages. In this project, me and my group came together to answer a driving question of how epidemics fuelled medical advances and figure out how it caused tension upon the masses. We research for weeks and put our information into a note book styled keynote. I was taught in this project about team work and and how to compensate for others when they can’t be there themselves. I feel that I will need these skills in grade nine and that is why I chose this project over any others. Although during this project there were some rough patches, I still really enjoyed getting to know the people in my group and working on a topic that I was passionate about.
Maker: I have had some pretty huge projects in maker, like both the winter and the spring exhibition, but the one that I learned from the most was destination imagination (DI). DI was a project ptournament that PLP does every year. Although it was long and hard, I got through it. And I think that that is a skill in itself. I learned a lot of team building skills and even learned about how to handle disagreements in a calm fashion, I feel that this is a skill that I am going to need even beyond high school and university. I also learned a whole bunch on time management when I had to help plan out our presentation, and about being organized, because if you stuff was not organized, it would get lost, ruined or taken by accident. With all the difficulties that came with DI, there were some parts that I quite enjoyed such as venturing around the different schools that DI took place at and watching everybody else’s presentation and seeing how relieved they were when it was over.
Overall, PLP was a great experience for me and I am stoked for next year. I went through the good and the terrible, but I made it through. Not to say that there aren’t things I would have done differently. If I were to redo this year, I would’ve wrote a bit more on my learning portfolio, acted a little more calm when it came to presenting, and maybe volunteered a bit more, but these are all things I can work on for next year. That said, this year wasn’t all that bad, I learned a lot about myself and my work habits. For one, I am not very good at explain everything, but I am rather good at dissections which I would have never known unless i were in ms klausens scimathics 8 class. With all the skills I have learned this year in PLP I strongly believe that I am ready for grade nine.
