This project started with us learning about something that seemed totally unrelated to our main project.   Our final goal of our “It’s the End of the World as we Know It” was to re-write the lyrics to “its the end of the world as we know it” by R.E.M. to explain how moving to Secondary School challenged our worldview. We also had to have a photo documentary to go along with our song. My groups (Findlay, Kaia and Lauren) project started with us learning about different cultures and how they act towards other groups. We played a fun game to better understand this concept. We were split in half as a class then given two very different cultures that were made up, then we had to talk to the other group and try and guess what the principals of the other group was. This really showed us how other groups interact when they come in contact with another group that is different from them. It also highlighted the differences between groups and how conflict could happen when they argued about something they strongly believe in.

We where then to read The Books of the Lion about a poor man turned into a warrior of the crusades. This book showed how two opposing sides can fight for something they really believe in because they believe that they are making the right choice, even if their beliefs are not grounded in fact. The overall themes of the book include loyalty and forgiveness.  Along with the book we also answered different questions and each week discussed our findings. It was interesting hearing different perspectives and understandings and we usually had compelling discussions. Most of these really contributed to later understanding of different peoples world view.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also along with reading the book we learned more about the conflicts between both sides of the Crusades. We then wrote a short paragraph on “Why the Cultural Exchange Shifted Worldview’s” among the two sides fighting in the Crusades. 

After that we started angling our learning more towards the song and how “The transition between Secondary and Elementary challenged our Worldview”. We first made a triple Venn Diagram, one section being what I think about secondary school while still in grade 7, then there was what my peers thought and the third was what experts thought, based on a report by the National Association of School Psychologists. The result of our class’s Venn Diagrams were quite similar, but did highlight everyone’s unique perspective.

 

 

The second to last thing we did was creating a Mindstorm on an app called MindNode  which allowed us to easily create a detailed Mindstorm about how our values, society, economy, geography, beliefs, time and knowledge has changed since arriving at Secondary school. We where then to discuss with a group what we found was the hardest part of this MindNode. For me it was the Economy part of my MindNode, but maybe not for some others who thought beliefs was the hardest part. This was a very important part of the bigger project because it showed us how not everyone see transition the same way. It also when later when coming together with our groups, we could combined what we our thoughts on the transition so our song will answer the question “how has the transition between elementary and secondary challenged our worldview?”. 

 

 

And finally we got to making our song. We spent a good amount of time first writing our own lyrics then combining them together with our groups for our last set of lyrics. I think the hardest part was writing the individual lyrics because of how random the song felt. As a result most of the lyrics were hard to replace because not very many words could fit the same way as the original. Ultimately coming together and making lyrics was a lot easier because if I did not have anything to fill a space, someone else always would. Our fist draft was not the best because our microphone recorded the background music as well, so you would not be able to hear our voices. We re-recorded the whole thing and it came out a lot better than we expected. 

 

 

Over all I think this was an interesting project. At first it was a bit confusing but, later it made much more sense. This project did force me to think about my thinking and analyze my own world view and the changes happening for me. This was one of the goals Mr Hughes highlighted for me in my recent MPOLS . Those are my thoughts on our “It’s the End of the World as we Know It” project. 

  

 

That’s all for now.