It’s that time of year again! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to TPOL’S (Transitional Posts of Learning). They happen once a year, and are in many ways similar to MPOL’S. TPOL’S are the blog posts of all blog posts. They are where I talk and reflect on the whole year. So without further ado;
Destination Imagination
I talked a lot about teamwork in my two Destination Imagination posts this year. That’s because there’s a lot of great things to say about it. One thing i didn’t really talk about was the “leader” of our group. There wasn’t one. We were all leaders in different parts. Some of us were in charge of the script, or the songs. Obviously there was more than just the script and the songs, but I won’t bore you with the whole list. I’d never worked in a group where there’s just one leader before. It’s really nice because you don’t have the pressure of being the leader and making most of the decisions, but you don’t feel like you aren’t contributing enough. I think it also helped that we all got along well. We listened to each other well and didn’t argue about much. We did really well in our performance and in our instant challenge. Our second performance was much better than our first. We listened to what the appraisers said and made a lot of revisions based on the feedback that we got. Since we were willing to listen to the feedback the appraisers had for us, we did much better in provincials. I have learned new ways of working in a team after this project, and i now know how much you can improve if you really listen to feedback.
Cloning
I really enjoyed the cloning project, though it was frustrating at times. I found it cool to learn about cloning plants, because I’m personally interested plants and possibly becoming a landscaper. However, (as usual) there were some problems with my group. Not everyone was carrying their weight. We tried to resolve it within our group multiple times, but the two group members continued to not do any work. Eventually I had to go to mr gross with another group member to address the situation, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to get the project done by the deadline if the other two group members didn’t start pulling their weight. This project demonstrated that I’ve learned to ask for help when it’s needed. I’m glad that we asked for help because I’m happy with the final outcome, and how things were resolved.
Lego
The lego project was another example of challenging group work. There seems to be a lot of that in this program. With this project, I ended up doing the majority of the work. Again, i tried many times to resolve the problem on my own, but (just like with the cloning project) it didn’t work. I could’ve gone to mr gross again, but I knew that I could get the work done in time for the presentation. I also didn’t think that going to mr gross would really work this time. I ended up finishing the project on time, and overall Im happy with the final product. I feel like this is a good example of real life learning that will apply outside the classroom. Sometimes not everyone is going to contribute and you can’t always help that. The difference between the lego project and the cloning project is that I knew that we wouldn’t be able to finish the cloning project in time without help.
Comic book
I enjoyed this project, and learning about the treatment of shell shock. Before this assignment I had heard the words shell shock approximately 2 times. Both in Ottawa. So it’s fair to say that Ilearned a lot from this project. This entire unit was very important because we need to learn about the horrible things that happened in the past so we can learn from them and not treat people that way in the future.
We decided to make a comic book as a class, because our goal was to make World War One easier to understand and more interesting for kids in elementary school. We presented to the 6th and 7th graders at Cove Cliff Elementary. The first and second groups i presented to were genuinely interested in what I was presenting. It was easy and enjoyable to present to them because they wanted to know more and they asked questions. The 3rd (and final) group I presented to had a harder time understanding the topic, so they weren’t as interested in what I was saying. It was difficult to present to them, and it showed me that not everyone learns the same way, and that sometimes you need some background knowledge to enjoy things more. I also learned that it easier to present when your audience is interested in what you’re talking about. I will think about this for future presentations so I can try to get everyone interested.
I learned a lot this year about myself, and others. I made many, many mistakes, but I learned from every mistake I made. As I’m sure you know by now, one of my ongoing goals is to get work in on time. I am slowly getting better at this each term, but I still need to improve. I previously mentioned setting timers for myself, to work for 30 minutes, then take a five minute break. This method has been working well, but recently I changed it a little. Instead of setting the timer for the same duration each time I break the assignment up into smaller chunks, then I give myself a time limit. I just started doing this recently, but so far it has worked.
As you may know, recently I participated in the Destination Imagination regionals and provincial tournaments. In my last post I talked about regionals, and the process leading up to it. You can read more about that HERE. In this post, I will be talking about the process leading up to provincials, and how that went.
Regionals
As you may or may not know my group came in second place. We got scored on our performance, and different aspects of it. My group used our score sheet to prioritize what to work on. We decided that our main priority would be our set, because it didn’t work at regionals.
The Set
As I mentioned in my regionals post, our set didn’t work like it was supposed to, the cave didn’t roll up well, the drill fell off, and stuff behind the set fell over. So we decided to just scrap that set, and make a new one from scratch. Jessie constructed the new set. Lauren and I helped her paint it, and glue the cave onto the wooden dowel. When we painted the set we decided to keep the same design as before. However, we replaced the cave fabric so it didn’t bunch up when it rolled up. We also added a key ring into the end of the dowel to attach the drill to so it wouldn’t splinter again. Remaking our set was a big risk because we only had a few weeks between regionals and provincials. We barely had any class time because of spring break. So the set had to be made over spring break and it had to be done by the end of spring break so we could rehearse with it. Luckily our risk or rebuilding our set payed off. This set stood up easily on its own, had a working cave, and it looked great. Needles to say we got a much better score on our set, since it actually worked this time. I think the main reason that our set worked was because of the photo of Cole Sprouse that we taped to the back of our set.
Spectacle
Another main thing that we changed about our performance was our spectacle. In regionals, our spectacle was the first song. We decided to use props and masks, but that didn’t work very well, so we decided to change our spectacle. This took a long time to change, because we couldn’t agree on anything. We were originally going to change the spectacle to later on in the performance, in adventure awaits (one of our songs). Eventually we decided to keep the spectacle at the beginning, but we changed it a lot. Instead of using props we used dance, and instead of using masks, we used acrobatics. This gave us a much higher score, and it was much more fun to perform the dance. We scored much higher on our spectacle the second time.
Our performance!
As I’ve mentioned, our performance went really well! The set worked, (thanks to Cole Sprouse) the spectacle went smoothly, our songs worked well, and we only had to improvise once or twice. It was really fun to perform with my group. We did really well on our instant challenge, but i can’t tell you about that, it’s top secret information. We ended up coming first in our main challenge AND our main challenge. I had a lot of fun this year and I’m sad that I won’t be doing it next year.
Recently, we had our Destination Imagination regionals tournament. It was held at seycove this year. In this post i will be talking about our work leading up to regionals, regionals itself, and what we are going to change for regionals. I won’t be talking about the instant challenge, since we are not allowed to talk about them until globals is over.
The process
This year, I’m in the fine arts group (again). Our challenge is called “Change of Tune”. The task is to create a two act musical, in which music and lyrics are used to help tell the story. The first step was to come up with deals for our story.
this video explains it better:
Idea generator To come up with ideas for Destination Imagination, we wrote as many ideas as we could onto pieces of paper and cut them out. Once everyone was done, we spread out all the pieces of paper on the table and went through them one by one. We organized them into groups based on what they were about (ie. stage, story, setting, spectacle….etc), then went through! And got rid of the ones we didn’t like. I don’t think that we actually used any of the ideas from those pieces of paper.
Our story The idea for our story came from one of our practice instant challenges. The instant challenge was about getting stranded at an island and meeting a tribe that communicates in a different way than you do, and you have to figure out how to communicate with them. Our story change many many times, until we finally came to the conclusion that we would be campers, going on an adventure to find and reunite two halves of a stone.
The set If you have read any other blog posts from people in my group, you will know that we had many difficulties with out set. If you watched the video above, you will know that one of the challenge requirements is to use technical methods to create a set change. Our original plan was to have 1 big piece of fabric wrap horizontally around our backdrop. We had two wooden dowels on the side of the backdrop that the fabric fit in between. The idea was that when the rollers rotated, it would’ve rotated the whole set around to reveal the cave. Once we were done building the frame, painting the backdrop, and securing the dowels, we realized that it wouldn’t work. The fabric wouldn’t stay up along the top, because it was too heavy. We were originally going to fix it by tying it up with string, and unhooking it when we had to rotate it. However we quickly realized that it wouldn’t work.
Our next design
Our next design (which worked much better) was pretty different. We started by cutting out the cave from the rest of the backdrop, and hot glueing the fabric to the frame so it wouldn’t droop. We then moved one dowel to the top of the set. The idea was that we would spin the dowel with a drill, to rise and lower the cave. This actually worked when we were rehearsing, but the night before, we noticed that the wood was splitting at the end. Apparently the other dowel was also splintered, so we couldn’t use that one. So we just had to perform without a fully working backdrop.
Our new and improved hopefully working design for next time It was decided that the set needed to be fully redone. Frame and everything. The plan for the new design is pretty different. For starters, the set will be able to fold in half (to make transportation easier). We will also be repainting the backdrop on cardboard this time. To make sure the cave rolls up better, we will be getting grey fabric (the paint is what bunched it up). We are also inserting an Allen key into a new dowel to prevent it from splintering.
The performance
As you would expect, there were good, and not so good things about our performance.
I’m going to talk about some of the things that we did well first.
Improv
What’s a Destination Imagination performance without improv? During our performance there were a few times where people forgot their lines, or weren’t ready to say them. This may seem like a bad thing, but our team is great at improv. The fact that half of them were on the improv team last year probably helped with that. Rewatching our performance, there were a few points where it didn’t even look like improv, which I think is amazing.
Singing Watching other performances, and comparing them to ours, out of all the groups performing we were some of the only people smiling, while we sung. For the most part, we stayed on pitch, and on time.
The set
This is something that didn’t go well. As I mentioned above, it was splintering the night before, so it didn’t work for the actual performance. Luckily, we have plans on how to fix all of that.
This year I would say I definitely enjoyed Destination Imagination more. Our team worked really well together and didn’t fight (too much). I am looking forward to provincials, and working more with my team.
Winter exhibition I know I talked about the mini winter exhibition in my last SLC, but this time I want to talk about a different part of it. For the exhibition I was the DRI of my group. This meant I was in charge of keeping my group organized, and going to the teacher whenever we had a question, request etc. To be honest, I don’t know why I signed myself up for this position in the first place, if I can barely keep myself organized. Our group had *some* difficulties with agreeing on stuff, and actually COMMUNICATING. But other than that it was fiiiinne I definitely learned about leadership skills during that *fun* time. I think it was worth it, but I wouldn’t exactly want to do it again. Even though I will probably have to.
Oregon Oregon, like many other things this year has taught me more than I thought it would. You know, I’m starting to see a pattern with our work. It taught me about being responsible for my things. Girl Guides HAS taught me about this, but not as much as Oregon has. With Guides I’m only really responsible for my clothes, sleeping bag etc. With Oregon however, I was in charge of my passport (only for short amounts of time luckily), and I was in charge of money, and how I spent it. I also had to keep track of my iPad and Apple Pencil. Oregon also helped me become a lot closer to my friends.
DI
Destination Imagination was… fun? I don’t know how to describe my experience with DI, we (my team and I) definitely experienced some challenges along the way. Most if which I explain in my DI BLOG POST. If I were to quickly sum it up though, I would have to say the main problem was the work distribution. I’m not going to mention any names, because that’s not important. Some people did more work than others, and some people put in more effort and energy. DI taught me to see things from different perspectives, I’m not just talking about the main challenge when I say this. I’m talking about the main challenge, the instant challenge, and seeing the problem of work distribution from different angles.
Math
Math is a subject that comes somewhat easily to me. So far anyway. Since it doesn’t usually take me long to pick up on how to do something in math, I usually help others. This sometimes means that I don’t finish all the textbook work, but that’s mainly so we get the idea. I actually enjoy helping people with math, which might come as a surprise to some. I think it mainly comes from my nature of wanting to help people
Notebook/sales pitch
I think the notebook and sales pitch taught me more about group work than it taught me about actual history, and how to pitch an idea to someone. It taught me about how to deal with *difficult* group members, and people in general. It taught me to pick my fights. But most importantly, it taught me to stick up for my friends, and for myself.
Science paints
I haven’t presented this project yet, so I can’t exactly tell you how it went. However, I can tell you about the slightly disgusting process. First we ground up some different coloured pigments. That was the fun part. We ground up Verdigris, Oak gal Ink, Red ochre, Charcoal, and Violet. That’s not the part I’m going to tell you about though. I’m going to tell you about our “fun” experience with making the pigments into paint. The less disgusting way of making them was to mix an egg yolk with the pigment, then slowly add water. This way was fun, because it didn’t smell like fish eggs. The second way of making these pigments was to grind up fish eggs with our saliva. It made the entire classroom smell like “soft but satisfying” salmon eggs. It also made our hands smell like eggs.
Areas for further improvement I can definitely improve on many things. For example handing my work in on time, staying on task, not being a complete perfectionist when it comes to my school work. Last time, I focused on being a perfectionist. I haven’t accomplished much on this because, like I mentioned before, this will take quite a while to accomplish. I plan to be better at this by the end of next year. I will also work on balancing my work time with my spare time. I have already been working on this by setting a timer to work for 20 minutes, then taking a 5 minute break.
Biggest accomplishment?
If I had to choose my biggest accomplishment this year I don’t know what I would choose. There’s all of the in school awards, like my seyhawk award, or my outstanding grade 8 instrumentalist, or my trophy, medal and ribbons from DI. There’s also my outside of school awards and accomplishments, like my medal from my first ever tap competition, getting into pre-TapCo, doing a front tuck in trampoline, and. Then there’s my in school accomplishments. This includes coming to PLP, being a DRI of my group for the winter exhibition, becoming a mini teacher in math, and making all of my amazing friends here.
When we found out that imagination of 5 (my group for DI) was in third place we were ecstatic! We couldn’t believe that even though our vanishing act didn’t work, we came in third. We were happy to say the least, to be going to regionals alongside all of our classmates.
Prepairing for Provincials
Even though we didn’t get our scores at regionals, we did get feedback on our performance. Once we got back, on Monday we reread the notes and decided what to work on. We had to prioritize, because we only had ____ classes to prepare for provincials. We decided to change one of our team choice elements, from live music (singing with the ukulele) to a lightning bolt rainbow staff, because we got a very low score on it. We kept our other team choice element (costumes) but we decided that we would get a higher mark on it if we sewed them. Some of the fabric was difficult to work with because it was so fine. Luckily we didn’t have to change much when Sofia came back, all we did was give her the narrator part so Luca wouldn’t have to change in and out of her costume. We made some edits to the script (which I partly regret) to enhance our storyline.
The lightning bolt rainbow staff took a while to make, because; first we had to find a stick the right size for Syrah, then I whittled it, then over spring break, Alivia created the lightning bolt to go on top of the staff, after spring break, we covered the lightning bolt in white tissue paper and put a light inside, we wrapped rainbow tissue paper around the top of the stick, glued it all together, and we were done!
We also added a few props, and by a few I mean two. We added a sun amulet for citrine (me), and a wand for emerald.
During and after Provincials
We definitely did better job at Provincials. This could’ve been because we had more time to practice and improve. It also could’ve been the fact that we had one more person helping out “backstage”. Maybe it was just because we were more comfortable performing the second time around. Whatever the reason was, I know I’m very proud of my group and I for coming in second place in Provincials. Even though destination imagination was a fun experience, I think everyone (in my group at least) was glad once it was over.
Coming in second place means we could go to global stage, but we aren’t going, for multiple reasons, money being one of them.
If you’re wanting to check out my teammates’ blogs’ here they are;
Back in January we started the adventure that was DI (Destination Imagination). I have talked a bit about this in my SLC blog post. Basically DI is a competition between students, competing in multiple different challenges. This year we had six different categories, technical, project outreach, sciencetific, improv, fine arts and engineering. We were sent a survey about what our first, second and third choices were, we also put down one option that we really didn’t want to do. My first choice was the fine arts category, so I was really happy when I was told that I was in the fine arts group. The requirements for the fine arts category are; you have to have two team choice elements (something to show off your team’s skills and interests and make your performance stand out from the others), A colourful character, a colour that disappears and a vanishing act (where either the colour or something else disappears). I was definitely glad that Alivia was in my group, because I didn’t really know Luca Sofia and Syrah that well. After a few weeks however, we got to know each other more, and started to get along better.
(You can skip over this paragraph if you want.)
When we first started working on DI, our story was very different. Our original storyline was about a little girl and her grandmother. One night the grandmother read the little girl a book about a young girl (around her age) who went off into the forest one day. She found a box of gems in the forest on a rock and took one of the gems. As soon as she took it from the box, that colour disappeared! This book was actually written by the grandmother about what happened to her when she was a kid. She didn’t want anyone to know it was real though, so she said it was just a fairytale. The book had a “fake” map in it that the granddaughter decided to follow the map, to see if it was real. She eventually found the box of gems in the forest and took the yellow one. She was bringing it back, when she tripped and fell. The gem flew out of her hand and broke. All the sudden, all of the yellow disappeared from the world. When she got home, she was in BIG trouble. Her and her grandmother had to go back to the gem box and summon a colourful character to fix the gem. On their way to the gem box, they stopped by a village and they saw the effects it had on people in the village. Once they got to the gem box, they summoned the colourful character, who was actually covered in a cloak to make her look like a rock. The colourful character mixed various ingredients in a couldron to make another yellow gem.
We decided that it would be too challenging to preform that version of our story, so we basically started over. We kept the idea of the gems, and someone taking one, but that was basically it. We changed our storyline to, a story about seven colour gods, who all controlled their colours, plus something else related to their colour. For example; Blue kept the oceans and lakes healthy and fresh, and provided calm in times of distress. They lived in/by Summerville, where it was always summer, because the only god that could control weather was banned from Summerville for causing fifteen years of grey and darkness in the town, by covering the rainbow. She came back, stole the yellow gem, and yellow disappeared! Once emerald (the green goddess), citrine (the yellow goddess) and amethyst (the purple goddess) found charcoal (the white goddess who controlled the weather) they talked about what had happened, she said sorry, returned the gem, and became the official colour god of weather again.
to decide who would be who when we presented, we wrote down our top three choices of who we wanted to be, and everyone got their first choice! We had to adjust slightly once we found out that Sofia wouldn’t be able to make regionals. This was our original list of who would be what character; Melanie (me) as yellow, Alivia as green, Luca as purple, Syrah as grey and Sofia as the narrator. Once Sofia told us she wouldn’t be able to make it, we decided Luca would be the narrator as well as the purple goddess.
We came in third place in regionals! We didn’t get our ribbons however, because the computers weren’t working. We got our ribbons at provincials when we went up to get our awards for the second time we preformed.
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I talked a lot about teamwork in my two Destination Imagination posts this year. That’s because there’s a lot of great things to say about it. One thing i didn’t really talk about was the “leader” of our group. There wasn’t one. We were all leaders in different parts. Some of us were in charge of the script, or the songs. Obviously there was more than just the script and the songs, but I won’t bore you with the whole list. I’d never worked in a group where there’s just one leader before. It’s really nice because you don’t have the pressure of being the leader and making most of the decisions, but you don’t feel like you aren’t contributing enough. I think it also helped that we all got along well. We listened to each other well and didn’t argue about much. We did really well in our performance and in our instant challenge. Our second performance was much better than our first. We listened to what the appraisers said and made a lot of revisions based on the feedback that we got. Since we were willing to listen to the feedback the appraisers had for us, we did much better in provincials. I have learned new ways of working in a team after this project, and i now know how much you can improve if you really listen to feedback.
I really enjoyed the cloning project, though it was frustrating at times. I found it cool to learn about cloning plants, because I’m personally interested plants and possibly becoming a landscaper. However, (as usual) there were some problems with my group. Not everyone was carrying their weight. We tried to resolve it within our group multiple times, but the two group members continued to not do any work. Eventually I had to go to mr gross with another group member to address the situation, because we knew we wouldn’t be able to get the project done by the deadline if the other two group members didn’t start pulling their weight. This project demonstrated that I’ve learned to ask for help when it’s needed. I’m glad that we asked for help because I’m happy with the final outcome, and how things were resolved. 
The lego project was another example of challenging group work. There seems to be a lot of that in this program. With this project, I ended up doing the majority of the work. Again, i tried many times to resolve the problem on my own, but (just like with the cloning project) it didn’t work. I could’ve gone to mr gross again, but I knew that I could get the work done in time for the presentation. I also didn’t think that going to mr gross would really work this time. I ended up finishing the project on time, and overall Im happy with the final product. I feel like this is a good example of real life learning that will apply outside the classroom. Sometimes not everyone is going to contribute and you can’t always help that. The difference between the lego project and the cloning project is that I knew that we wouldn’t be able to finish the cloning project in time without help. 
I enjoyed this project, and learning about the treatment of shell shock. Before this assignment I had heard the words shell shock approximately 2 times. Both in Ottawa. So it’s fair to say that I learned a lot from this project. This entire unit was very important because we need to learn about the horrible things that happened in the past so we can learn from them and not treat people that way in the future. 
We presented to the 6th and 7th graders at Cove Cliff Elementary. The first and second groups i presented to were genuinely interested in what I was presenting. It was easy and enjoyable to present to them because they wanted to know more and they asked questions. The 3rd (and final) group I presented to had a harder time understanding the topic, so they weren’t as interested in what I was saying. It was difficult to present to them, and it showed me that not everyone learns the same way, and that sometimes you need some background knowledge to enjoy things more. I also learned that it easier to present when your audience is interested in what you’re talking about. I will think about this for future presentations so I can try to get everyone interested. 
