It’s about time again for our Mid-year Presentations of Learning this year, formerly known as our SLCs. In preparation for my presentation, I have taken some time out to reflect and consider the work and habits that I have formed so far this year, and to set some goals that I will work to complete throughout the next few months. Even though we have only been in school for a slick 5 months, we have worked incredibly hard on some awfully daunting tasks. I have grown many skills, and I know that I will only further develop them in the near future.
For the past few months, I have been working on growing and strengthening a few work habits and skills that will help me complete work to the fullest potential. First, I have been writing down all of my assignments as soon as I receive them so I can take full advantage of the time that I have. This has been very helpful for me because I have finished much more work on time than I had last year due to my poor organization skills. Second, I have pushed myself to start on my work as soon as I am given it as opposed to leaving it unstarted until the last minute. Last year I found myself consistently procrastinating every time I would receive an assignment no matter how many times I told myself that I needed to do it sooner. I have been pushing myself harder this year to accomplish that. Lastly, I have worked on being more communicative with other members of group projects
and making sure that the whole group including I are on the same page in order to make work our best. This has helped me to take group work even further than before.
One of the projects that I was quite proud of the outcome was our Metaphor Machine project, which you can read all about here. For anyone unaware of this project, I’ll briefly explain it. We learned about important governmental revolutions in history and then had to create metaphors for each portion of the revolt. Then, we took those metaphors and turned them into a Rube Goldberg machine. I know that sounds super confusing, so you can watch a quick video rundown of it here. I was proud of this project because of how many hours before, during, on lunch breaks, and after school that I spent on it. It ultimately worked better than we expected it to once we were finished it, and it was a really fun time.
A project that I feel I could have done better on was our Frankenstuffies project. We had to research, write, plan, film, and edit a five to ten minutes long video about a wild animal. The storyline was based on the habitat of the animal changing, and then having to adapt to it’s surroundings. This idea was difficult to me in part because of how I had trouble carrying what I would learn in science 
class over to humanities and back again. My video ended up being way shorter than I would have liked it to be, and I didn’t have a strong enough storyline to make it any longer. For the next time something like this happens, I can go above and beyond early on instead of rushing the planning steps and moving straight into the final product.
Just to wrap this up, I asked myself, how am I going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year? I have decided I want to focus on primarily one thing. I am going to focus on using the time, people, and resources that I have available to me for their full potential. I feel that I could have done much better work for the first semester of the year if I had really used the resources we have both at school and at home for more than I took advantage of. All in all I feel that that could help my work really go above and beyond the level that it is at currently.