Hello and thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
Today I will talk about the ups and downs of this school year as well as some of my favourite projects and least favourite projects. and through the whole thing I will try to show that I am ready to transition to grade 10 and continue my high school career.
This year felt a lot different than grade 8 to me, I started thinking less in the moment and more about my future as a learner and as a person. I found myself more often staring into space thinking about my next years of schooling and what I want to do in the future. So for me I found some setbacks in the mindset that I had this year, I think that was my biggest downfall. I wasn’t unhappy with my work and I had some things that I was in fact proud of in one way or another. To my surprise my favourite project was the working with words project. I found myself to be quite content while writing my poems as I was able to write about almost anything I wanted.
One of my favourite things to do in school is write stories, real or fake and simply speak my mind about what I’m thinking. I liked being given this freedom.
Since elementary school I have always loved just writing stories about random ideas I have or making my own rendition of a dream that I remembered slightly from the night before. I hope that I will do some assignments like that in the future.
This year I found Scimatics to be quite uneventful, It was basically a repeat of last year in my opinion with a few better subjects but the way we went about them was pretty much the same as last year, make a board game, make a tinker-cad model. However I did enjoy learning about cellular reproduction it was an interesting concept and I didn’t realize there were so many steps during the process. I think that my video presentation for it could have been a bit more polished in the end however.
My biggest issue with Scimatics is that we don’t do hardly any math and when comparing what units I went through with my friends outside of PLP I found that we did at most half of the stuff that they did, so when I heard that next year we wont be doing Scimatics and will be switching to normal math and science I was happy.
In humanities I think that the war to end all wars project was the most fun to do this year and I liked working on the comic portions and learning a bit about how to write a comic book and the key aspects of making one. 
I think that I learned a fair amount about the start of WW1 and some of the starting factors, however I think it could have been cool to also check out some other parts of the war as we were limited to one battle.
I found the revolutions on trial project to be one of my least favourite in terms of the building knowledge sections however it did provide a lot of good knowledge about some very important revolutions hence the name. I did think however that it did very well for my public speaking skills as I had to preform in-front of a sizeable audience and it went much better than I had anticipated. The goal of that project was to convey a message to an audience saying that the opposing revolution was ineffective. Sadly it seemed that the vote was rigged as historically our opposition did in fact have a successful revolution while mine mostly just resulted in more violence. It was still very fun and although my team lost I still was happy with my speaking parts despite some minor hiccups here and there. 
The biggest team building opportunity that I had this year would have to be our class trip over to loon lake. I think that this trip showed me a lot about the outdoors as there were a lot of outdoor activities that I participated in, also the lodge is located in a large area of untouched forests. However for me I think that I learned more about my classmates and got to know some people that I don’t normally talk to better. This trip worked a lot on teamwork as there were lots of team activities for example we had to work together in groups to make a working shelter in the wilderness. My favourite team activity was when we went and played battle archery which is where we were given bows and arrows and had to shoot the other team with foam tipped arrows to win the game. Some highlights of the trip for me was the meals because they have a nice buffet style serving area and I found that it was a good break area to just talk to your friends while eating some great food.
I also enjoyed just hanging out in the cabins where all the rooms are located as it was a chill place to relax on free time. Part way through the trip sadly a good few of my friends went home sick which made the trip alot less fun as most of my friends left leaving less to do, this made it especially hard to work on my DI project as my entire group was gone except one person and me however we still got some important stuff done.
This is a great transition to my next point in demonstrating my learning this year, Destination Imagination. I think that this year DI showed me that sometimes having a group that is completely comprised of most my friends doesn’t always result in getting the best work done. I was in the technical team this year and needed to make two machines one powered one unpowered and have them conquer some obstacles while telling a story at the same time. Me and my group seen here:
We made our machines quite early meaning that our biggest setback would have to be the obstacles. These were made up of rough terrain, a tunnel, and our movable objects. I think that we defiantly could have made them more detailed but they still did the job. Our story on the other hand took a bit longer to make but I think turned out quite strong in the end and had a great message. Once it was time to present to the judges I think everything went smoothly until one of the wheels on our buggy popped off while driving resulting in a big loss of time and made it hard to finish our presentation as planned. In the end we came 5th out of 5 spaces which was too bad but I had some fun and learned some lessons, so it was fine in the end. 
My final highlight would have to be the end of year spring exhibition. I liked the whole planning process and the challenge of mapping everything out for the grade 8s to understand. I also enjoyed baking cookies for the guests which was an added bonus that I hadn’t expected I would do at the start. I appreciate the job that the teachers did making sure that we got it all set up in time and thought that it didn’t look half bad in the end. Even though I was just handing out beverages and cookies the whole time I had fun and had a great time even when the occasional person would steal an extra cookie without me noticing.
I think that raps everything up, truthfully im not sure over the past 2 years that the PBL formula or pathway has been best suite for me however with the changes to Scimatics next year I think it might get a bit better, anyways ill stick it out for at least 1 more year and ill see where that road takes me and how I feel overall. That said ill give it my all next year and ill make it a good one. Anyway that’s why im ready for next year.