Hello and welcome back to my blog! I’m here with our first grade 11 project called “Mightier than the sword”. This project was all about building onto our writing skills by bringing back topics from last year, but also included social awareness and communication skills. The final product for this project was a piece of writing towards the grade 8s.

We started off this project by boosting our memory about everything to do with writing. To show our learning we created a writing journal that included a few activities we completed. The first one was Pre-Writing where we brainstormed ideas on the general topic of grade 11 then completed a free write on the same topic. During the brainstorming activity my group came up with ideas about specific topics we can focus on writing about to describe our grade 11 year. I found this step helped to narrow down an idea on what to talk about in more detail. As for the free write I feel it allowed me to find more topic ideas as I was able to just write my thoughts. 

Next was the Writing Workshop where we worked with Effective verbs and action words. As well as the Academic Writing. For the Academic Writing we were tasked with writing a paragraph on why PLP is a good choice for students choosing a specific aspect of PLP to talk about. I decided to talk about how teamwork is a beneficial learning approach that PLP implements as it allows students to develop skills that are beneficial in the real world. Then using the pre-writing skills we learned about beforehand I was able to identify the five aspects of Rhetorical Situation for my topic and how that impacts the writing. For this writing piece we also had to find at least two sources to support our topic. I am super happy with how my paragraph turned out and I feel this was a good activity to sort of get an idea for what we would write about for the final product.

This brings me to the final part of this project and the most important, the grade 8s. In this part we got the chance to have a little meet and greet, coffee and doughnuts type of meet up with them in the morning. I thought this was a great way to get to know some of the grade 8s and get their perspective on how they think grade 8 is so far. This allowed us to learn about understanding our audience, purpose and context. Using what we learned from the grade 8s we were able to answer a series of questions carving the way to get to the final product. When we started working on the text to the grade 8s aka the final product we needed to come up with a specific aspect of grade 8 to give them feedback or advice on. After talking with the grade 8s lots of them were talking about going on trips this year so I decided to make my topic “How to get the most out of your PLP field studies”. Through this topic I was able to bring all my notes into three main topics that connected to field studies. Then I just made my writing casual but informative. 

In this text like every other step in projects included the revision process. To switch things up we not only got feedback from our classmates but also the grade 8s. When reflecting on my text to the grade 8s I feel I did a good job with keeping my points clear and easy to understand while connecting to things the grade 8s might already be completing in class. Check out my final product here: The Grade 8 Guide to Field Studies and my feedback down below ⬇️

Overall I think this project was a good reminder of everything your writing should include and I feel like all the steps we completed were beneficial to the final product. I’m pretty happy with how my final product turned out and I hope you enjoyed reading about my learning!