Wednesday November 1st was take your kid to work day. I went to my mom’s work for the day, she’s works as a landscaper for Blooms ‘n Botanicals. For take your kid to work day, the grade 9s at seycove had to interview 3 people, and write down their responses, but since we’re in PLP, we didn’t do that. Instead, (because our theme this year is story finding and telling through video) we filmed our interview, and we were assigned a blog post along with it.
My day:
Wake up at 8:00
Work from 9:00-12:30
Lunch from 12:30-1:30
Work from 1:30-3:00
Blooms ‘n Botanicals
Blooms ‘n Botanicals specializes in landscaping design and maintenance. “At Blooms n’ Botanicals we strive to create a colourful year-round garden or patio with shrubs, trees and plants that are best suited to your lifestyle and the environment where you live.” – The blooms & botanicals website.
My mom’s work
As I’ve already mentioned, my mom works for blooms ‘n botanicals. While I was at her work I got to help out. I didn’t do too many things, because in real life there isn’t an undo button. Plus I’m not actually trained in that job/job field. I just did small things, like raking leaves. I enjoyed raking up the leaves, probably more than most people would. I also pruned lots of plants. Pruning is getting rid of the dead parts of plants, and just trimming them down in general to prepare for winter.
Last year, during our advertising unit, one of the ads that we had to make was for a business. The business I made my ad on was blooms ‘n botanicals, so it was cool to actually experience what I was advertising firsthand.
Interviews
While everyone was eating lunch (including me), I went around and asked people if I could interview them. I asked one question for each person, and here are their responses:
This is difficult to answer specifically, because there are many careers involving landscaping, and there are even more “mini jobs” within those careers. Let’s start with the “bigger” careers within/involving landscaping. Some of my top choices would be a landscape architect, and working as a garden Center employee might be fun. When I was in grade 7, one of the projects that I did was on a possible career. The career that I chose to research was a landscape architect. So I know that being a landscape architect would be a good job for me. I can also see myself working as a residential landscaper, because I enjoy gardening, and I have had experience with it on multiple occasions because I like to help with the garden in our front yard. I also usually help plant the vegetable garden.
This blog post will be filled with highlights from the year so far. It will include an example if the work that I’m most proud of, an example of my learning, an example of my growth mindset and three goals that I have set for myself.
The work that I’m most proud of is definitely my work for destination imagination. I’m proud of how well my team and I worked Together and I’m proud of how well we did at regionals, despite the fact that our vanishing act didn’t work very well. The story that we created was very creative (in my opinion anyway) and we managed our time well (most of the time). We worked very hard and in the end you could definitely tell. When I heard that we came in third place out of all the groups that were competing in the fine arts category I was thrilled!
One example of my learning this year is my work on advertising an advocacy. We started at the beginning of the year, where we made an advocacy ad about disasters caused by earthquakes. A tourist ad about one of our favourite places to go that is somewhat secretive or hidden. And a business ad where either our parents were the boss, or we knew the boss. I’ve written more about these ads in my advertising and advocacy blog post. During our trip in Oregon we made three more ads. We all made an advocacy ad about tsunamis, but we were split up into separate groups for our business and tourist ads. For our tourist ad, my group was assigned Fort Stevens non historical. Our business that we interviewed was the South Beach Fish Market. I wrote more about these ads on my going coastal post. I think I have really improved on my ads since the start of the year. I now have a better understanding of how to use pathos logos and ethos in my ads to make them better.
My growth mindset experience
In my mini exhibition blog post I explain how I had to completely change the design of my house a few days before the exhibition and normally that would make me really annoyed and think “why me? What did I do to deserve this?” But for some reason I wasn’t even that annoyed. If this happened at the beginning of the year however, before i knew about having a growth mindset versus having a fixed mindset I probably would’ve gotten really stressed. The final product would’ve probably reflected my mood at the time (meaning I would have done a poor job, just in case you couldn’t figure that one out). In the end I ended up loving my project and it was all thanks to my growth mindset.
My goals
I have set three goals for myself for the remainder of the school year. I will now explain what they are, and how I plan to achieve them.
My first goal is hand more work in on time. I will achieve this goal by staying on task, and not talk to my friends as much during class. This is definitely something that I will have to work on for the rest of the year, because I like to talk, A LOT. I know I can improve by the end of the year because at the start of the year I was much worse at focusing, but now, I’m not so bad.
My next goal is to make sure that all the work I hand in is work that I am proud of. To do this I will make sure that I proofread my work before I hand it in. If I ever wonder if my work is good enough I will revise it and make some edits until I know that it is more than just good enough. I will focus in class more, so I have more time to revise my work.
My third and final goal is to be more organized when it comes to my school work. I will do this by prioritizing my work when I am doing my homework and I will organize my work in my binder or on my iPad at the end of class. I will set aside five minutes just to organize my work so I don’t lose any of it.
During Oregon we did many cool things. This blog post will be an example of just a few of the things that we did.
Why we went to Oregon.
Oregon was more than just your average field trip where the only reason you go is to learn. We didn’t just go to Oregon to Learn about marine life. We went to get to know each other better and work better as a team, or as Ms Willemse says a family. Being close with your classmates not only helps make you closer with your friends but it helps a lot with group work, which we do a lot of in PLP. One of the other reasons why we went to Oregon instead of just learning in a classroom was because it’s fun! When something is fun, you tend to remember it better. For example if I asked you what you and your friends liked to do at recess in grade three you would probably remember it, but if I asked you what you learned about in grade four, you probably wouldn’t remember.
Oregon ads
During our trip we made ads about Oregon. We were split into 5 groups and were assigned a place and a business to make an ad about. We have been learning about advertising and advocacy since the beginning of October. So we had a pretty good idea of what to do. If you read my post about advertising and advocacy you will see that we made a tourist ad, a business ad and an advocacy ad. You will also notice that above I only talked about a tourist ad and a business ad. This is because we didn’t have to do an advocacy ad! Ha, just kidding we actually did =(. Our advocacy ad was about tsunamis.
Business ad
For my business ad my group was assigned South Beach Fish Market. To make
the business ad we had to come up with a list of questions to ask the manager of the restaurant. We recorded the interview (with the owner’s permission of course) so we could listen to it again later. To make the company’s logo I took a picture of the back of the manager’s shirt and painstakingly traced every line on the crab. Then I coloured it red with a blue background because when we asked in the interview they sais that their colour scheme was red and blue.
Tourist ad
I didn’t have to do quite as much for my tourist ad as I did for my business ad. For my tourist ad my group was assigned Fort Stevens non historical. Otherwise known as Jetty Observation Tower. When we were there it was very windy and rainy, but it was still a really cool experience. To create the ad I chose a photo of the water because that was my favourite part of Jetty Observation Tower.
Advocacy ad
Just like the tourist ad my advocacy ad didn’t involve as much work as my business ad. For the advocacy ad everyone in the class, not just my group was assigned an ad about tsunami awareness. For this ad I illustrated a tsunami wave over a city.
Our Book
During Oregon we were working on a book that we made using Book Creater. The book explains what we did and where we went each day, it also has some facts about the places we visited. When we were making our book during Oregon we drew things like what animal we wanted to see, or what our favourite meal was. We also wrote about different things like how big haystack rock is, or explaining how we set up our experiment. If i were to go back and do this book again I would spend less time worrying about the drawings and work on it more on the bus. Here is my iBook.
If i had the chance I would go back in the blink of an eye. Oregon was a life changing experience and just one more reason to be in PLP.
Google year in search is a video by google about what has happened this year and what people googled. It is important to know about what is going on in the world and what people are googling. It is also important to know about (almost) everything that happened in 2016 whether it happened to you or not you were alive at that time.
One thing that I didn’t understand in the video was when a rocket looking thing landed on water. After asking some of my class mates If they knew what it was called. Apparently it’s called SpaceX and it’s basically a company with the goal to create technology to reduce space transportation costs and make the colonization of Mars possible.
When I was looking at the top search trends of 2016 for Google I was surprised to see that people were looking up “Who is Siri?” I found this surprising because I am an Apple user so Siri is the only “intelligent assistant” that I really know anything about.
I’m probably not the only one who finds it slightly surprising but at the same time there are probably some people who would find it shocking if someone else didn’t know what cortina was.
If I made my own year end review I would include my grade 7 graduation, meeting new friends at Seycove, Halloween, Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I would also include some smaller things like my friends birthday party or my trip to Shuswap Lake this summer.
Currently in school we are learning about advertising and advocacy. So as a challenge we had to make our own advertisements. After each draft we got into small groups of about 5 or 6 and critiqued each other’s ads. We gave one specific comment (something specific that they could improve upon) and one helpful comment (something that you liked about the ad that they could improve even further upon).
For this ad we had to advertise a certain place to teenagers. I chose Cambridge St in Vancouver BC because it is so beautiful in the fall.
The Tourist ad
Draft 1
You can see how much my ad has changed from draft one to draft three. In draft one most of my feedback was about how I made the ad too crowded with photos.
Draft 2
With this one I got some mixed messages. I still got people commentingon how my ad was too busy. Someone also said that my pictures blended together too much and that I should outline them. So I was at a bit of a loss on what to do.
Draft 3
On the app that I used for post one and two you couldn’t outline photos, so I decided to try a different app. If I could I probably would’ve had more than one photo, but alas (sighs) I could not figure out how to turn the photos. Luckily for me I think it turned out better this way! So yay for that!
The advocacy ad
for this ad we had to advocate for a change in people’s behaviour towards earthquake preparedness. As you will read in the paragraph below I misheard the instructions at first and did my ad wrong. So really it had nothing to do with earthquakes. I chose to do my ad about fire because I thought it would be different from the other ads and it would be fun to make.
Draft 1
You’ve probably noticed that draft one is a little different from draft 2 & 3 cough cough sarcasm cough cough. This is because I misunderstood the directions that our teacher gave us. She said “you will be creating an advocacy ad about a disaster”. What I failed to hear was the part about it being related to earthquakes (because that’s what we are/were learning about in science).
Draft 2
My teacher said we had to use our own photos so I thought “do you know what would be fun? I know! How about we set a cardboard house on fire!” Since it took a while to make the cardboard house and then try to figure out how to set it on fire in the rain I decided that I wasn’t about to just throw all my hard work out the window and start from scratch. So I researched a bit further, and turns out that fires and earthquakes are actually related!
Draft 3
For draft three I rearranged the text so it lined the photo like a picture frame. I made the paragraph that was at the bottom into four different sections. The right and left columns, I separated “did you know that there is a high risk of fires after an earthquake” and put it at the top and I put “have an escape plan, get out alive” in the bottom corner. I also put “Don’t let this be your home” near the bottom.
The Business ad
for this ad we had to advertise a certain business. We had to know the owner or someone who was close with the owner. I chose Blooms ‘n Botanicals because my mom’s friend created the business.
Draft one
To make draft one I took pictures of my garden from different angles. While I was taking the pictures I had to try to keep my house out of the background because I wanted the focus on the garden.
Draft two
I didn’t change much between draft one and draft two. I just reworded the bottom part. Most of the feedback that I got for this one was about the green colour that I put my text on. They said to make it more green and to make it brighter.
Draft three
One of the comments on my second draft was that there was too much green. So I decided to colour the bottom half of the picture gray. Then I put a paintbrush on the ad to make a point that the company brings colour to your garden. For this ad I was going to change the green but I decided to edit the photo first and then once I edited the photo the text showed up on it. The only reason that I had the green in the first place was because you couldn’t see the text if it was on top of the photo. Once I edited the photo though, you could see it easier. I’m probably going to outline the text so you can read it easier.
This angle gives the impression that the person (or animal) on screen is powerful.
I This photo was pretty easy to take because I’m short, but bacically I got down on my knees and pointed the camera up. Pretty simple.
The High Angle Shot
This shot is generally used to Tell the audience that the person (or animal) on screen is less powerful.
This shot isn’t the best because I am actually shorter than the Person I was taking a picture of. Next time I should probably stand on a box or something. B
The Medium Shot
This shot is basically just looking at the person (or animal) straight on
This shot was probably the easiest to take because I just pointed the camera straight forward. That’s it. Nothing else. Just straight forward.
The establishing shot
this shot is just what you would think it establishes where the movie or short film will take place.
All I did to take this shot was back up a lot and take a photo. I know sooo complicated.
The Close-up shot
(Flattering I know). The close up shot is a shot that is close up. No… Really?
For this I just zoomed in on her face and took a photo.
The Wide Shot
This kind of shot is generally used to capture a large group of people in one shot.
for this I just backed up a bit and took a photo. To make it better next time I should take a panorama.
As I’ve already mentioned, my mom works for blooms ‘n botanicals. While I was at her work I got to help out. I didn’t do too many things, because in real life there isn’t an undo button. Plus I’m not actually trained in that job/job field. I just did small things, like raking leaves. I enjoyed raking up the leaves, probably more than most people would. I also pruned lots of plants. Pruning is getting rid of the dead parts of plants, and just trimming them down in general to prepare for winter.
This is difficult to answer specifically, because there are many careers involving landscaping, and there are even more “mini jobs” within those careers. Let’s start with the “bigger” careers within/involving landscaping. Some of my top choices would be a landscape architect, and working as a garden Center employee might be fun. When I was in grade 7, one of the projects that I did was on a possible career. The career that I chose to research was a landscape architect. So I know that being a landscape architect would be a good job for me. I can also see myself working as a residential landscaper, because I enjoy gardening, and I have had experience with it on multiple occasions because I like to help with the garden in our front yard. I also usually help plant the vegetable garden.
