Hello blog readers,

Our second to last project of the year is complete. It was definitely something that had so many tasks and I’m here to tell you all about it. From the beginning to end, here is everything I learned. 

First we had to get the need to knows. The driving question, the reason we were doing this, and what the main project would be. The project was about how Canadian minorities experience canada. The driving question was “how is the Canadian experience different for minorities?” The first steps were to research Canadian minorities and pick the one we liked. We wrote a minority Paper pitch. It was a 5 paragraph paper explaining 3 minorities that we were interested in. After that our teacher used that to put us in groups matching one minority we were interested in. For the project we had to make a 15 minute podcast. I worked with Jamie, Logan, and Marshall. Here are the results.

Chinese Minorities 

Now let’s look at the work we did prior to making this podcast. As a class we were focusing on the Chinese minorities. We read a book called The Jade Peony. The book was about a family of Chinese people living in Chinatown. After every part of the book that we would read we would write summaries about it which really helped me process what the book was supposed to show us. We also went to Chinatown to further learn about the history of Chinese minorities and the background of Chinatown. Going to Chinatown was an amazing day and I truly learnt so much. During the tour I was walking with the older male chi ones tour guide and he was talking to me about capturing the essence of Chinatown and why its special to him. He was a great photographer as well and showed me his amazing photos of Chinatown. It was really nice to bond of the art of photography while he taught me about the uniqueness of the town. That day trip was probably the best one I think we have had, plus we got dumplings and that was a major win.

Podcast Making 

This was not the first podcast we have made but since we are still new to podcast making, this podcast was harder to make than expected. We did have a podcast making practice though. When we were in Chinatown, we recorded the sounds of Chinatown. This helped me practice recording sounds, playing around with sounds, interviewing, and making music. All those skills were very useful while making the podcast. For the podcast I was in charge off making an intro and talking about Japanese minorities in the present. I had two interviews done. One of them was veery boring so I had to get another one for the final draft. During the podcast making we had 3 drafts but I still see improvement that could be made. However, I do like the work we produced and it does cover the basics of everything you should know about Japanese Minorities.

Position Paper

Another part of this unit, was writing a positionally paper. This paper was also a 5 page paper but it was an in class paper. In class papers basically mean you come to class one day and write the whole paper in that block, then hand it in when class finishes. It may seem hard but its much easier and less stressful than writing the paper at home. You also get to bring an outline with you to class that day. Before writing this paper, we practiced writing, by doing some writing prompts. We did a writing prompt on age, location, and gender. All these writing prompts were done in class. We would get around 30 minutes to write them. Even though they seem like just a simple task, they were very good to get my ideas out to help me with my paper. After finishing the paper, the first revisions we got were from our teacher, and the second from our peers. Getting feedback and revising is a very important part of plp so we had 3 drafts of this paper. 

In the end, this unit was something I didn’t except to learn this year. It’s focused on many minorities and showed me the issues. I loved listening to everyone’s podcast and I never got bored in class because I was genuinely interested in my personal minority. Time for the last unit and project of the year.