More Happy than not is a book that I read in class and has been at the centre of many of my assignments from this unit including this one, the more Happy than not book trailer. In this assignment we chose one of four book options layer out for us and got into groups based on which one we chose. My group consisted of Adlih, Isabelle, Melika, Logan, and Luca. Me and the other members of my group all chose to read More Happy than not, a book about a teen boy who wants to forget that fact that he’s gay because of the pain that it has caused him, so he uses a special procedure called the Leteo Procedure to do so. We all completed the book, and now p our objective was to imagine that the book was to be made into a movie. We were supposed to create and film our interpretation of what the trailer for that movie would look like.
We had to pick and choose certain passages and the most important scenes to include in order for the trailer to make sense. We put all of our ideas into outlines and storyboards that we used as a guide when it came time to start filming. We had planned out all the settings, costumes, music, and a script for the video, and it was finally recording time. In order to get all the shots we needed, my group and I traveled downtown to record different scenes that we needed for the final trailer. We had also filmed at people’s houses, different stores (with permission of course) and even the workplace of my friends mom who was kind enough to drive us downtown and let us film there. We also filmed at parks and other places that we came across while walking around downtown.
After this, we edited together our first draft and it was time to review, critique, and revise. This is our first draft.
After revision, we completed our final draft and I quite proud of how it turned out. Our final video even included a self written song that Luca wrote and sang to be the audio for the trailer we created.
This is the final video.
Once finished, we took the QR code from our video that had been uploaded to YouTube, printed out a bunch, and pasted them on the inside of all of the books all the copies we had of our book, more happy than not. That way anyone can take a picture, scan the code, and be directed to our video. So basically in other words, this video will always be around to haunt us forever.
All in all, I was so proud of our group for being so cooperative, easy to work with, and for all contributing in some way wether that be in the form of filming, acting, providing a setting suitable for the scene, sharing their ideas, writing the script, creating a storyboard, finding costumes, organizing when where and what to film, and so on. I learned so much throughout the duration of this project such as how to pick out a good setting and how to plan around everybody else’s schedule as well as my own. We really hit home with the visuals and music and the video turned out extremely well thanks to our hardworking group members, and peers who gave us helpful feedback to change things like the voice overs and quotes which we completed for the final draft.
How do authors use text to teach us more about ourselves? This was the driving question for our synthesis essay and many of the other assignments in this unit. One of these projects was the book trailer, where we were made to pick one book from the few that we had to choose from, and get into groups based on who chose the same book you picked. My group consisted of Adlih, Isabelle, Melika, Logan, and Luca. Me and the other members of my group were all reading a book called More Happy than not. Once wefinished the book, our objective was to imagine that the book was made into a movie and create and film our interpretation of what the trailer for that movie would look like. To learn more about the filming process and final outcome of this project, click the link to be redirected to my blog post regarding the book trailer.
The next project after this was the Synthesis Essay. The criteria for this specific project was basically to create a five paragraph essay answering the driving question of How Do Authors Use Text To Teach Us More About Ourselves? Using examples from not only the book that we read for the previous assignment, but also from another book called Persepolis, as well as the widely known movie The Breakfast Club, the next step was to research and brainstorm these three examples. Now with this newfound knowledge, we can answer the driving question in our own words and derive around five paragraphs of text doing so. Before writing, we looked at how to create an essay outline using the Standard Five Paragraph Essay Outline Format as a guideline. Writing this outline helped us prepare ourselves to write the final essay when it came time to do so in class, and it would help the writing process go a lot smoother.
When preparing to write my own essay, I chose to answer the driving question using the perspectives of the characters as proof to validate my thinking. I also practiced going over how I would format the essay itself and what information I would put where. After all of this preparation, it was finally time to Write the in class essay, and we had the whole class to finish it, some even staying to write through the break in order to get it done.
The whole process of completing the essay taught me many valuable things such as time management, formatting skills, as well as how to become a master at critiquing your own work.
I really enjoyed taking feedback from my first draft that I completed in class and improving my essay for the final draft which I will insert down below. Before I end this post, I will say that there were definitely areas that could’ve used further improvement such as my title and theaesthetic aspects of the essay were a bit lacking. Keeping this in mind, there were also many things that I did very well in my opinion such as answering the driving question clearly, and creating a good outline beforehand.
With summer having come to a close and school beginning again, a new project has arisen. The project is based around a book of our choosing, and by reading this book we can find an answer to our driving question, that question being “How do authors use text to teach us more about ourselves?”. The book have chosen is called More Happy Than Not, written by Adam Silvera. I chose this book because the description made it seem like the type of novel that would keep me interested throughout the duration of the book, and me being the type of person that gets bored of books quite easily, I felt this was the right choice for me. Having only read the first few chapters, it’s hard to tell at this point what will happen throughout the storyline, but if I were to guess I’d say one of the main characters dies and the rest of them get their memories wiped to make the pain go away. That’s my guess, but I’ll have to keep reading to find out what really happens.
after reading the first few chapters, me and a group of classmates worked together to create a video depicting some of the key events and scenes from the book. Adlih, Logan, Melika, Luca, Isabelle and I worked together to plan out and film scenes from the book that we would then put together and share with the class. This fun Mimi project was one of many to come, be sure to read any of my upcoming posts to stay posted on this project and many more.
In these last few months, our humanities class has been focused on the topic of the First World War. Our driving question was “How did WW1 impact Canada’s identity?”. The first assignment of our WW1 unit was to read one of three books that were assigned to us over spring break. The three books consisted or War Horse, Private Peaceful, and Generals Die In Bed. Out of all three of these books, the one that seemed the most interesting to me was Generals Die In Bed. This book was about a soldier named Charles and his experiences in the first world war and all the challenges he faced. Reading this book was our first introduction to the First World War, before we did this, we had to learn the reason the war started in the first place. It all started with the assassination of someone called Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie who was. He was the Archduke of Austria and he was shot by a Serbian member of a terrorist group called the black hand. Although there were many other reasons for the war break out, this tragic event triggered the beginning of the First World War.
We learned about many events and battles that occurred in World War One on our trip to Ottawa, which I also wrote a post about earlier. Click here to check it out! This trip war run by Encounters With Canada, and was a way to not only teach us about The First World War, but to give us a chance to meet friends from all over our beautiful country of Canada. It was a unique experience that I will never forget, and gave me a chance to learn in depth about one of my favourite battles of WW1, the Battle of Vimy Ridge. This was the battle where we as Canadians got a name for ourself, and it brought Canada closer together as a country as well.
There were many topics to do with WW1 that we learned about, and the next task we had was to pick one and make a four page comic on it. The topic that I chose was a woman’s changing role in the First World War, but I narrowed it down to A Mother’s Changing Role In WW1. After extensive research on my topic, I put all my ideas into a simpler form to fit it into the comic. Inserting my information wasn’t the hard part, the most difficulty I had was making sure that the comic itself had good formatting and was aesthetically pleasing. My comic had gotten critiqued not only by myself, but also by my peers. Some of the feedback that I got was about little things like font and the alignment of text boxes, but other than that, my comic was looking pretty good. After editing it several times, it was finally ready to present to an audience. We took a trip to one of our local elementary schools and showed our comics to a class of sixth and seventh graders. These kids weren’t quite familiar with the topic of WW1, so it was fun to be able to answer their questions about it and share with them some information about the various events of the war.
After our visit to Cove Cliff Elementary, we took a look at a site called shattered ground. On this site, we walked through the story of a kid who was looking through pictures and diary entries from his great grandfather who fought in the war. We were taken through the many memories of his great grandfather’s experiences in the war and saw the things that he went through. We had to take notes and answer questions about each chapter.
This whole unit has taught me things that I will always remember. Weather it be the significance of each battle, Canada’s role in the war, or how the war started in the first place, the amount of learning that took place during this unit was incredibly large. I not only learned about the war and everything that happened during it, but I also obtained some new formatting skills of comic life, learned how to keep seventh graders entertained for an hour, and most importantly, I learned that Canada as a country was uniquely impacted by the war. Canada came out of the war more united then when it went in, and as for our identity, we no longer specifically identity only with our individual province, but rather one country that encompasses all Canadian provinces alike.
Confederation. It brought together the land we today call home. The road to confederation was not an easy one, but we have currently been learning all about it. At first, Upper and lower Canada consisted of the French and the English. There French and the English never really saw eye to eye, and this was for many reasons. First of all, there was the obvious language barrier, then there was the fact that the French felt belittled by the English, and rightfully so. The English controlled the government and had power over all decisions made in Canada, which led to more and more of a divide between the English and the French. Sometimes when certain things are required by one side but aren’t exactly beneficial to the other side, compromise isn’t always the first resort. An example of this with the French and English could be seen in the rebellions of 1837, where the French held two separate uprisings against the British. The rebellions occurred for many reasons regarding things like land, money, power, and rights, but also for responsible government. The French wanted a responsible government, which is a government that requires an elective assembly to make decisions rather than being run by the family compact, which consisted of rich men that had been appointed by the British government. The French wanted change, and responsible government was that change. With a responsible government, the French could finally be able to have a say in matters of parliament, therefore have a higher chance of having their demands met, so they fought for this chance. The uprisings in upper and lower Canada caused some concern in the British government. In order to find the root of the problem, Queen Victoria appointed a man named Lord Durham (the governor general of British North America) to go and further investigate what caused the recent rebellious activity in upper and Lower Canada. Lord Durham’s final report back to Britain brought upon the Union act. The union act would mean that there would be no more Upper and Lower Canada, but one colony that consisted of Canada East and Canada West. Also, Canada would finally be a separate colony from Britain.
Years later, responsible government was finally achieved by none other than Lord Elgin, lord Durham’s son in law. Coincidence, I think not. It didn’t end here though. A group of politicians including George brown, John A.macdonald, George Cartier, and more, had a bigger plan on how they could get not only Canada East and west, but many of the other surrounding colonies to come together as one big colony. This idea was of confederation, the coming together of what we today know as Canada.
To display our knowledge of confederation and everything leading up to it, our class had started a project. We had previously been watching a lot of heritage minutes which are minute long videos on people places or events that are an important piece of Canadien history. For our project, we were tasked with creating our own heritage minute on a topic of our choice that hadn’t already had a heritage minute made about it. After observing and analyzing more heritage minutes that I can count, we actually got to FaceTime and interview the managing editor of Historica Canada, Davida Aronovitch. If you didn’t already know, Historica Canada is the company that creates heritage minutes. For the heritage minute that my group and I would be making, my group consisted of Adlih and Robin. We had decided on an overall topic of the mother’s of confederation. We chose this topic because of the fact that many people know of the fathers of confederation, but not many people know of the women who worked behind the scenes when bringing Canada together. We felt that it was only right to bring attention to the woman that made confederation possible, because they didn’t get all of the recognition that they truly deserved for their efforts back then, so why not give it to them now. Once we had chosen our topic we had to do the research. We researched a handful of woman who qualified as mothers of confederation, until we narrowed it down to one woman who we felt best fit our project. We chose Anne Brown, wife of George Brown, one of the main fathers of confederation. Anne is a mother of confederation because of the major influence she had over her husband George. She convinced him not only to apologize to the French, but to team up with his rival, John A. Macdonald, to push for confederation. Without Anne’s hold over George, he would’ve never set aside his hatred for John, and they would’ve never teamed up and come up with the magnificent idea of bringing all of the colonies together as one.
We had also been learning about proper script making and how to create a professional script like the ones used for movies and tv shows. Underneath is a copy of the script that my group had created for our heritage minute. We had planned that our heritage minute would be from the perspective of Anne, and that she would be writing a letter to George. We would include flashbacks of important events in Anne’s life, like when she first met George, and when George left for the conference in Charlottetown. Also, the letter would include dialogue of Anne convincing George to team up with John.A, and reassuring him that it is the right decision.
After the script we created a storyboard of all the events that would take place from the script. Then we started to actually film. After getting a peer critique on our first draft from both my classmates and teacher, my group worked on editing the video and we ended up getting our second draft. For the second draft we added redid the audio, and added some scenes before yet another critique. Except this time, we showed not only our peers, but a bunch of other grade nines from in a different humanities class. We fixed the last few things in our video and finished off the project with a finished product that we were proud of, and I think it’s safe to say that we did a pretty great job!
here is our final heritage minute video.
This project really taught me the depth of how long and hard the process of bringing Canada together really was. Not only that, but how to successfully create an aestheticly pleasing and informational heritage minute. To think, before this project, I didn’t even know what a heritage minute was. Through the research of this project I was even able to discover my favourite heritage minute on Viola Desmond. All of the actors in this minute were on point and really gave the film emotion, plus, the message or really powerful and is one of the most interesting of all of the heritage minutes i have watched. Overall, I was really proud of the end product of that my group had created and perfected, and had a great time during the creating process. I hope to do another project like this in the future!
They’re back! You may be wondering what in the world I am talking about. I’m talking about only the single most important thing in PLP history! That’s right, its student led conferences. I am prepared to share with you examples of work that I have completed this year which all reflect back to my driving question, “How am I going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?”
I have four main PLP classes which are maker, humanities, math and science. The very first example will be a project that took place in my maker class. When referring back to past projects that I have done in this particular class, the decision of which one to talk about was not hard. I picked the Star Wars exhibition project because it was, in my opinion, the most interesting. I got to show off my creativity and love for art when hand painting my backdrop, and creating my three sculptures out of clay. It was also quite interesting to learn all about the realm of Star Wars. Keeping this in mind, there is always room for improvement. I know that even in a project like this that I enjoyed so much, I could still improve upon several things such as the décor of my station, of which could’ve been a bit more detailed, and the quality of clay that I chose; one that didn’t crack and fall apart so easily. Also, I would leave myself more time to edit and revise the written portion of my display.
Another big part of the process of making this good project great, was working with the eighth grade PLP kids in order to decorate the room and plan out the night of the exhibition. Through working with the grade eights, I realized that teamwork is really vital to the success of our projects. In order to have a team run smoothly, you have to be able to compromise when it comes to ideas, make your team members feel heard and appreciated, and definatly make sure that the whole team is in the loop about anything and everything, in regards to decisions made or even who’s bringing what.
Additionally, throughout the process of planning and building this project, I learned some valuable skills, not only about group work, but also about time management and the wonders of planning ahead. I feel that improving my pre-planning skills is an important part of helping me progress as a learner throughout the school year.
My next example is a project that was a mixture of humanities and math. This was my metaphor machines project. Although not all aspects of this project reflected my best work, I had learned from both, my successes and my challenges during the process. For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised with the direction of this project, and it reflected e skills that I had already learned, such as how to work successfully with my team members, and most importantly, how to remain calm under pressure.
In this project, however, the most improvement could have been made in the final video. While keeping in mind that this was a group project and I didn’t have complete control over the making of the video, I still know that I could’ve taken more time to revise and edit the video to fix some of the glaring mistakes (obvious to me, even if others couldn’t see them).
One skill, in particular, that that this project demonstrates that I could benefit from working on improving, is my time management. I often feel that this has a lot to do with my mindset. When a project seems initially complicated, I sometimes convince myself that it’s a lot harder than it would be if I just split up my work, and took it a little bit at a time. I feel that the first step to overcoming this challenge is to stop overthinking things, start my projects earlier, portion out my work more evenly throughout the amount of time that was given for the project and in a way that ensures I get it done on time.
The last example a project that, much like the metaphor machines project, was for mixture of two classes, humanities and science. I found this project to be on the more difficult side. Although the research and script were fun to do, the process of creating the final video was quite overwhelming for me. This was for two reasons, I had many bad experiences in the past with the filming app that we were supposed to use, and again, I had difficulty portioning out my work time. Another helping factor to my stress during this project was the fact that I decided instead of filming regularly like most others did, I would draw out and animate my video. Note to self, it’s not as easy as you think. Although I had a great deal of struggle trying to complete this project, the learning that took place made up for that. I had learned not only about the land, climate, and wildlife of all different regions of Canada, bit I also learned a great deal on all the different matter cycles and their importance.
In this year, I have pin pointed weaknesses and developed ways to overcome them, but have also exploited my strengths and learned how to use them to my advantage. I now have a plan to overcome my time management in three parts. I will look at each major project within one to two days, ask questions if I need any clarification on anything, then not only break down the work into portions, but put it on a calendar so that there is something physically there to motivate me. I feel like this plan will help me further progress as a learner, and will be something that will not only benefit me this year, but will become a habit that will sticks with me all the way from high school, to university, and beyond.
Have you ever heard of steampunk? Or maybe you have but have no idea what it is. Well by the time you finish reading, you will know all about it! Steampunk is a concept of retro futurism, or in other words, it’s basically the idea of having these extravagant futuristic gadgets and spectacular steam powered machinery being used in a time period around the 1800’s (the Victorian era) that wouldn’t have had such advanced tech at the time.
Now we know what steampunk is, but if we were to Imagine what it looked like, what would you picture? A lot of people might see a lot of gears and Victorian styled clothing and those cool looking goggles that everyone seems to associate with steampunk. This is all thanks to a little thing called the steampunk aesthetic. The steampunk aesthetic uses the theme of taking something from the future and putting it in the past, and expands off of it by exposing what’s on the inside and having it shown on the outside (exposed gears, wires, pipes etc…). Anything with a steampunk aesthetic to it would usually have a similar colour scheme of brass and copper colours, as well as gold and sometimes silver. If your not already a steampunk expert by now, click here for more details regarding everything steampunk.
I dug deeper into the concept of steampunk and started to think of an inquiry question concerning all that I have learned about the subject. After toying with a few question ideas, I finally made the decision to go with this one “how could we make the world steampunk, or is it even possible?” . In my opinion it could very well possible if we stopped using fossil fuels and other sources of energy and switched to purely steam power. There would be no internet, no Netflix, but if it came down to it, I feel like it could potentially be possible. The only thing standing in the way of a steampunk world, is the cooperation of the people. Not everyone would have the will power to ditch the internet and say goodbye to Instagram forever. And a change in society of this size would take a whole lot of convincing, and people can be pretty stubborn when it comes to parting with their beloved technology.
So in conclusion to my question of “how could we make the world steampunk, or it even possible” I propose that yes, it could very well be possible if we switched to steam power only. With this said, it probably wouldn’t ever happen, because a big change like this would not appeal the majority of the population. Sorry to all the steampunk lovers out there, I hope I didn’t completely crush your dreams.👍
Revolution, what is it? Well according to Crane Brintons theory, it is an negative phenomenon that can be compared to a disease. This is because it is said to have stages that are similar to the attributes of someone coming down with a cold or fever, and can be cured in a similar way to that of a sickness. In his theory, he stated that all revolutions have somewhat similar stages. The first one being the incubation stage where symptoms are shown, like common a financial crisis and a sense of injustice or abuse from the government. As well as an incompetent ruler, a shift in alliances, a division between social classes, and a military victory. Then there is the second stage, the moderate stage. In the moderate stage, led by a moderate leader who tries to use compromise instead of violence. In the moderate stage there are usually more protests and violence, but only on a small scale. The third stage is where the violence drastically increases, they usually end up killing the former leader, the radicals take over control from the government, and with their new leader in charge and their armies stronger than ever, they go to war. The very last stage is the recovery stage. In this stage, the violence lessens, the radicals are no longer in power, things start to return to normal, and it ends in ether peace or war.
Now that you know about Crane Brintons theory of revolution, you can better understand my inquiry question regarding that theory. My question was why didn’t Canada ever have a revolution? I came up with this question when I was thinking about all of the countries that had revolutions and how most of them ended up going to war. So I thought to myself, canadiens fought in the war, but I have never heard of a revolution taking place in Canada. Well it turns out I was wrong, there was a revolution in Canada, maybe not on that is very well known, but it did in fact happen.
In 1837, with the rebellion of both upper and lower Canada. This could be considered part of the first stage of Brinton’s theory, the incubation stage. This is because they started to want a new and better government, which could be considered to be like the beginning symptoms of a cold. The third stage would’ve been years later when the colonial oligarchy fell and the new order was that each state would be self governed. The fourth and final stage would’ve taken place in Quebec 1864, when the proposal for a general government was denied and things ended in peace and started to somewhat normalize like getting over a cold.
In conclusion, the answer to my question of why wasn’t there a revolution was to the contrary of what I had thought it would be, because there was in fact a revolution in Canada. Some of the sights that I used to research this topic are as listed below:
Frankenstuffie. What is it you might ask? It is the name of one of the biggest projects we’ve done all year. We were tasked to pick a region, matter cycle, and two animals in our region to create a short video. The video was about how an interference in a matter cycle caused an animal of your choice to basically take on the features of another animal to help its chances of survival.
My region was the interior plains, a beautiful place with diverse ecosystems and a wide variety of different species of wildlife. One of those amazing species is the white tailed deer. I had chosen the white tailed deer to be the main focus of my story. Considering that I had previously done a project on white tailed deer, and had also recently visited Calgary (which is in the interior plains), the research portion of the project was quite easy for me. Some things I had to know about my region were things like it’s overall climate, the wild life that inhabited the region, and it’s vegetation. Once I knew all that I needed to know, I could move on to creating the story episodes. The story had to be written in episodes, and all the episodes were part of an overall story board. For example, episode one was the exposition, which established what was happening. Episodes two and three were the rising action, which introduced some sort of issue. The fourth was the climax, where some sort of major conflict occurs, and the last two episodes were the falling action and the impact, where they show the reaction and consequences of the previous events.
I really enjoyed writing the episodes, I felt like I could get really creative and was very proud of the end product. When I was done writing them up, I had to edit them and then change them to be past tense instead of present. This was hard to do for me, mostly because I felt like when I was making it past tense, it took away from the story and made it a bit more challenging to understand. With this in mind, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be in the end. The most difficulty I had was when I had to make my story into video footage. This was because I wasn’t particularly happy with the footage that I was getting, and being the perfectionist that I am, it was hard not to focus on the tiny details instead of the main ideas. The easiest option when filming, was to use the green screen and film your stuffy using this method. When I was using only the green screen, It felt like I couldn’t capture all that I wanted to. Then I decided it would be easier to just make animation. Little did I know that animation were really annoying to create when you have a time constraint, and it didn’t help that making one second of an animation took me like twenty minutes. It would also get on my nerves when the app I had been using would lag out every two seconds. I had lost my work several times while using it, RIP all the scenes that I worked so hard on but accidentally got deleted. Even with this, I made it through and finally finished it.
One thing that I haven’t yet touched bases on was the creation of my actual frankenstuffie, it is the name of the project after all. Like I have mentioned, the animal I picked to be the main focus of my video is a white tailed deer. A main component of this project was to take a stuffy version of the animal you chose, and cut it up. Then, I needed to add parts from another stuffy. In my video, a white tailed deer morphs into a deer wolf hybrid and has the legs, a tail, and teeth, of a grey wolf. Knowing this, I got both a deer and a wolf stuffy to recreate this hybrid from my story. I know what you’re thinking, a deer wolf hybrid? That’s not the slightest bit realistic! Let’s just say that we’re not being marked how believable it is. Well, I lied, that isn’t completely true.
Yet another big section of this project was learning and incorporating the matter cycles. If you don’t already know of the matter cycles (nitrogen cycle, phosphorus cycle, carbon cycle, hydrogen cycle/ water cycle) then I suggest you click on this link and learn all about them. I was given the nitrogen cycle, and was tasked with finding some way that there could be a disturbance in that cycle. After giving it some thought and talking with the teacher, I decided that there would be a massive drought and that would be the disturbance. Without the rain, the nitrogen in the air would never reach the soil. Without the nitrogen in the soil, the plants couldn’t use it as food and they would die off. Because of the lack of plants, the deer would have no other option but to eat meat, like a wolf. And this worked perfectly for me because deer actually would actually become part wolf.
This project was quite challenging but also very fun. I have learned some valuable skills about time management in the process, and learned some new things like how to use a green screen and making animations. Although the end product didn’t turn out exactly as I hoped, I know that it’ll just make me want strive for better on all my other projects to come.
