Archive of ‘Group work’ category
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.
A few weeks ago in humanities we started a unit called this changes everything. It was about how advancements in technology create tension. So of course, we did, not one, but two projets with this unit.
Before the project
Of course, before we did our project(s), we needed some background knowledge. We learned about multiple things and people. First we learned about the red Fs of feudalism, fealty, fief and faith. When we learned about the three Fs of feaudalism, we were put into groups, and made a keynote (slideshow) about it. Once we were done that, we learned about how “back in the day”👴🏼 If you thought differently from everyone else, or if you were creative, you were considered an outcast.
During the first project
In order to be sorted into the groups that we would be in for the next two projects, we made a list of our top three topics that we wanted to focus on. Next class we were sorted into our groups, I was in a group with Tamara, Sofia and Emily. Our group was focusing on weapons. The first project was to make a book about your topic. Obviously weapons would be too big of a topic to cover in about 8 pages, so we had to narrow our focus, and make a question to answer throughout the hole book. Our question that we made was “how has the evolution of portable gear and weapons affected law enforcement?”. All of us got two pages to write about our question in a certain time period. Sofia worked on the Middle Ages, I worked on the renaissance, Tamara worked on the technical revolution, and Emily worked on modern day. We each chose 2-3 weapons to research/write about that we thought had made an impact on people’s lives.
Drafting the notebook
Our first draft looked like four different books put together. I think that was mostly because we couldn’t come to an agreement on if we would have our text 
on top of, or beside our photos. Eventually we came to an agreement that our pages that were specifically about our time era would be text beside photos, and all of the other pages would be text on top of photos. Overall our first draft was a bit of a mess. It got a lot better after we got feedback on it though. It started to look like an actual book, nit just a bunch of random pages SLAPPED together. We were continuously working on the book, making small changes along the way, so we didn’t have to do as much work all at once.
The Sales Pitch
The second part of this project was to make a sales pitch. Basically, we had to come up with a revolutionary invention in the field we were studying. My group invented a weapon, the transportation group made a new way to transport people/things etc. My group decided to essentially make a bomb that would shut off the electricity in the area it was set off. Our invention is basically an EMP that lasts longer, and has a wider range. We also “designed” small attachments that you could clip onto any device, to ensure that it would not be affected by the C4-E Alpha (our invention).
Presenting
Originally we were going to present outpr final draft of our sales pitch to people from Apple, and people from the school board. Then we (the teachers) realized that it would take too long, and it just wouldn’t work. So instead of that, we were at a table with some other people talking about different aspects of PLP. Not 
everyone was able to come, because it was during a different class. Most people from band didn’t go because we had cabaret the next day (which was fun by the way). I wouldn’t know much about what happened because I wasn’t there presenting. This was because I was in band, and (like I mentioned before) I couldn’t go. No one in my group ended up going, because Emily Tamara and I were in band, and Sofia wasn’t there the day we signed up. This meant that after all of our hard work, we weren’t able to present our final draft to anyone other than our class. I don’t think that any of us minded that much though, so that was good.
In my Destination Imagination Regionals blog post, I talk about regionals for DI (destination imagination). Now I will talk about provincials, and the process leading up to it.
After regionals
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;
Alivia
Luca
Sofia
Syrah
A video of our performance will be up soon.
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.
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.
What work am I most proud of?
https://youtu.be/Pkugu4JRBfg
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!
https://youtu.be/gvlQINZ8zNA
One example of my learning this year
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.
I haven’t blogged about scimathics on my learning portfolio yet, so why now you may ask. Well we’ve been doing a lot of cool things in science and math and I figured it was time I told you about them. Also we were told to, but that’s not the point!
What is scimathics?
Scimathics is a combination of science and math. It is taught by Ms Klauses. She calls us her lambs/plamps/little lammies.We have scimathics every day because it is two blocks combined into one. I explain how this works more in my Day one Day two blog post.
At the start of the school year in scimathics we (PLP 8) were introduced to The rightness of being wrong. In September I wasn’t completely used to the idea that being wrong can be right but as the year carried on I became more comfortable with it. Now that I’m so comfortable with the idea of the rightness of being wrong when I’m in my other classes I am less stressed. This doesn’t mean that I put less effort into my work, just that if I fail or get something wrong, I don’t get as disappointed and I know that I can learn from my mistakes. This also ties into growth mindset and fixed mindset and learning from your mistakes.
What have we done this year?
Lemme/Llama
Our lemme project, or as Ms Klausen called it, our llama project was mostly about the Pythagorean theorem. We learned about the spiral of theodorus. We started out outside where she challenged us to first make a triangle using only three cubes. She then challenged us to create a curved line using straight lines, on a piece of paper. Then we were challenged to do the same thing, only this time we had to add right angles. I didn’t figure out how to make a curved line with right angles, but once she showed us the spiral of theodorus, I understood.
My door is a bore no more
for this project we got into groups of three and had to increase the surface area of a door by three fold. Even though we were in separate groups, we had to work together with the other groups to make sure that when we were done, the total surface area of the door was increased by three fold. To increase the surface area, we built 3D shapes out of paper and taped them to the door. Before this project we were working with surface area and volume, so we knew how to calculate surface area. At the end we wrote an engineering report on it.
Minecraft earthquake proof project
For this project we made an earthquake proof structure using Minecraft. We were in groups of two. Our main objective was to add earthquake proofing features to a 100×100 building. We had to choose an earthquake prone region of the globe and base our architecture off of the kind of buildings they have in that certain area. Tamara and I chose Ancient Greek/Rome. We painfully placed all 10 000 blocks down for the floor, 968 blocks for the pillars, all 429 blocks for the arches, 10 100 blocks for the roof and 260 blocks for the Y beams. If you think that was a lot, there was also the HUGE amount of blocks we had to destroy for the ocean that for some reason we decided to build, (it was actually so our landscape looked more like Ancient Greece). You know, that and the fact that we had to redo our structure about 6 times due to complications with running into mountains, rivers and TNT exploding too close to our building (that may or may not have been my fault). We made half of the building the same as how they were originally built, and added earthquake proofing features to the other half. Once we were done, we made a video explaining how our earthquake proofing features work.
These are all of the main projects that we have done so far. I will continually update this post as we learn more.
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.
Currently in school we are learning about Julius Caesar. So instead of just reading about him (and all the other people from the play) Ms Willemse assigned us a body biography. My group was assigned Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger. We got to work researching him right away. So once we were done our research we outlined the body of one of our classmates and started drawing.
Who was Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger?
Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger (aka Marcus Brutus) was born on October 23 
85, BCE and he lived in Rome in a Roman temple. His parents were Quintus Servilius Caepio and Marcus Junius Brutus the Eldera. He was a military commander and a politician who loved his family and his people. On March 15 44 BC Marcus Brutus assassinated Julius Caesar with 9 others. His father was killed by Pompey the great under terrible circumstances. He committed suicide on his birthday of 42 BCE by getting someone to hold a sword while he ran into it.
What we put on his body and why.
We put an army helmet on his head and armour on his leg because he was a military commander.
We put a Roman temple on his body because he lived in one
We put a shield over his heart with people behind it because he believed in protecting his people and we put a family by his heart because he loved his family.
The baby and the tombstone represent when he was born and when he died.
We put a thought bubble of him killing Caesar and a sword in his hand to represent that he was part of the assassination of Julius Caesar.
The sword in his hand represents the fact that he committed suicide.
We put a symbol that says SPQR on his body because he was a politician. SPQR stands for Senatus Populus Que Romanus and was the symbol for Roman politics.
This was a really fun project and I’m looking forward to learning more about Julius Caesar.
Creation process
For humanities we had to come up with a question based on the environment and try to find an answer to it. Obviously it couldn’t be a yes or no answer. We wrote down our top three choices for what we wanted to research and submitted them to our teacher so she could approve one of our questions. My three questions (in order) were: 1) How can we differ housing to adapt to the rising sea levels? 2) How does changing currents affect prey? 3) in what ways can a lack of knowledge about sea life cause some sea animals to go extinct? The teacher (Ms Willemse) chose my #1 question and helped me reword it to this: How can I adapt my coastal housing so it won’t be washed away from the rising sea levels?
So I was very glad that I got my #1 question. I started by researching what is causing rising sea levels and how fast they are rising. After I discovered that sea levels are rising an average of 3.3 mm a year I had to think of why that would be a bad thing. I came up with a few reasons, if it takes that long to rise people won’t bother with rebuilding their house because they will think “oh I have lots of time. I don’t need to do this now”. In other words, they’ll keep putting it off then it might be too late to “renovate” their house. Another reason is: the water will saturate the ground near/underneath your house so after a while your house (most likely the basement if you have one) will rot. As soon as my question was approved I knew that I wanted to build a model of the house. My initial plan was to build a house on stilts, 
but then I was thinking about different ways to create a house that wouldn’t get washed away with the rising sea levels and I thought about possibly creating a floating house because a house on pillars might be too expensive.
I kept working on my “diagram” for the house on pillars though because 33% of people get seasick in “normal conditions” meaning small waves, and 66% of people get seasick in “bad conditions” meaning large waves, things you wouldn’t necessarily want to be on a boat in. 
So I decided to go with the pillar idea, until my friend pointed out that a house on pillars may not be very legal because of earthquakes. So the project was due in 5 days and I was basically back to the drawing board for the diagram. Luckily my research still applied to the new model that I was going to build. I did some more research about earthquake proof buildings in Vancouver to see if I could just add something to my current building and then this picture came up.
So it turns out that there is a building in Vancouver BC called The Qube that people are saying is earthquake proof, because in an earthquake the cables suspending the building would allow it to rock back and forth. As I was looking at that picture I realized that it was slightly raised off the ground, and since I was trying to create a house that wouldn’t get washed away with the rising sea levels I thought that I should base my building/house off it. Obviously I couldn’t make a direct model of the building, so I had to modify. First off, The Qube is not a house, it is a headquarters for Westcoast Transmission Co, and when I wrote my inquiry question I meant a home. So I came up with this 
. I had a lot of fun making the house and garden.
Group work
During the the mini exhibition I was the group leader. This was my first time ever being a group leader and I will admit, it was more stressful than I thought it would be. Since I was group leader I had to organize everything. I was in charge of making sure that everything we needed was going to be there, I had to tell people what to bring and where to set everything up. It would’ve been a lot less stressful if we had another week or so to make our projects but things got complicated with the Oregon trip being postponed. I think it would have also been a lot better if we distributed the work load better. I felt like there was a lot of work that I had to do for the exhibition, like: making a chart of where everyone would set up their projects/tables
Organizing who would bring what for our toss game (fake food, containers, pop cans etc)
Trying to sort out what group would get the projector
Figuring out how we wanted our corner of the room to be set up (ie decorations, what we would do with the whiteboard etc)
And on top of that I had to make my project for the mini exhibition.
Here are all my group members’ blogs/learning portfolios: Syrah , Luca O, Daniel , Lauren, and Tamara.
All though it may not sound like it, I enjoyed the exhibition a lot.
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, 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.
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.
, 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
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.
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.
