Hello and welcome to the second mPOL in my PLP career. Today I will be talking once again about my strengths, weaknesses, successes and FAILs aka first attempt in learning, and my overall thoughts about this school year so far.
Declaration of learning.
“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.”
Starting things off with my learning plan:
I set some higher expectations than last year but still kept them in the achievable zone.
My first project of this year was a reboot of a project we had attempted to do last year but was cut short and dropped. However we did manage to complete it this year. This project was my least favourite one so far due to the fact that it was about the gold rush. If I’m not mistaken I have learned about the gold rush in one way or another every year since like grade 4. This year was a bit different as we looked at other countries involvement in the gold rush but for me that made it more difficult as I was tasked with looking at Australian involvement in BC’s gold rush. It turned out that Australia had almost no documented involvement in BC’s gold rush which made it extremely hard to make an entire story about it. I did find some info about Australian involvement in the California gold rush which took place not long before the Fraser River gold rush, so I ended up writing a story about how the Australians got to BC after travelling to the California gold rush and from there going to BC. 
I’m glad that the goal of this was to make a fictional story based off of real events as I’m sure that some of the information I talked about wasn’t 100% true, but I made it work out in the end. Overall a bit of a rough start to the year.
This next project entitled Ology Of Apology was a fun one and was also going to be what we would present at the winter exhibition the idea was to research some unjust events in Canadas past and create a memorial which we would then present at the exhibition. I was happy with the overall result however before I could get there I had a rough time because I got hit hard with a cold. This caused me to miss a week of classes. I did my best to keep up with work from home but it did make coming back the next week quite tough as I had homework for not only PLP but in my other classes too. When I came back it was quite a rush to finish the homework I had and also get prepared for an exhibition, but luckily the final step for the project was in groups so I was able to spend time catching up while my group members worked on the project and once I was done I could then help out. In then end I was happy with our result, we made an heritage minute about the Japanese internment and I think the exhibition also went well. I find that so far each year the clean up after the exhibition is the most enjoyable part because it’s after the rush of visitors and I feel good as I just presented my work to a bunch of people.
Now that the exhibition was over it was time for winter break. Me and my family went on a trip to Maui Hawaii which was super fun and a great refresher as it was something fun and different. I don’t tend to travel much which made this trip all the better and it was definitely something I was not used to. 
Coming back to classes after this trip was super refreshing and I’m feeling a lot better about this semester and from the few classes I’ve done so far I’m feeling good about the rest of this year.
Also after coming back we did a quick project on Romeo and Juliet which I found to be very fun as we got to recreate a scene from the play as if it happened today. I liked my group and with the short amount of time that we got to film we made what is in my opinion a fun rendition of the play which we didn’t take super seriously as there were some funny moments and it was overall just an enjoyable little project.
The biggest change this year for me is the absence of the Scimatics class which in my opinion is a good change as in the first semester I found that having a dedicated science class not based around project based learning was very refreshing and I felt like I retained the knowledge better after each topic. Math on the other hand may be a different story as I haven’t worked solidly on math for a while and I may find it to be challenging but I guess only time will tell with that.
Overall this year has been pretty good so far and I’m looking forward to where the next projects go. I’m definitely looking forward to the upcoming field study and I hear we’re going to do some podcasting later on which should be fun. So overall a good start to the year and I’m looking forward to what comes next.
Thank you for listening to my mPOL.