ROBIN’S BLOG

Yes, I know we already did the Winter Exhibtion, but unfortunately there’s another one. This time we only had a week compared to a month last time! The PLP 8s had just gone on a trip to Oregon (I didn’t unfortunately) but they learned lots about adventure. The theme of our exhibition was adventure, and the driving question was “How does language inspire adventure” .  My group was Brooklyn, Emilia, Carmyn, Sawyer and Oliver. I really like this group because of how well everyone worked together. Brooklyn really kept the group together because on the day of the exhibition, Emilia and Carmyn kept wandering away when we were supposed to be at our station. Brooklyn stayed for all of it except for her break. I stayed for all except I left for a few minutes because I got my break late.

Our theme was Challenge and Growth. We decided that for food we would make cake pops and use green icing to make them look like trees. Carmyn brought two bite brownies as dirt. We wanted to make a challenge so we used cup pong as a game. We didn’t want everyone to take all the food so we made it so they earn it from the game. There are 11 cups and 10 normal cups. The normal ones have a challenge/question that comes with it. If you complete it successfully, you get a brownie! If you get it in the red cup you get no punishment and a cake pop!

 

For our costumes, we wanted to wear dresses, so Emilia lent me this really pretty spring dress. Here’s a picture!

(covering our faces for privacy)
It’s so pretty I’m in loveee😍

The ads we did were about convincing people to going to Oregon

I was in charge of the ads and merch stand. I wait I forgot to show you our Oregon merch! I made the caps and water bottles, Emilia made the tote bag and Brooklyn made the shirt and some sweatpants (that didn’t make the cut)

We also had a stand that had seashells that looked like the ones they saw in an Oregon!!!
This was my last exhibition, and I’m so sad because I won’t be in PLP next year! My TPoL will probably be my last post ever😭. Stay updated!

I can’t believe it’s the end of the year already😭. Grade 8 has flown by so fast! Because it’s my last year doing PLP, I want this last post to be special. If you havent guessed by now, I’m leaving PLP this year.

My PoL Declaration

“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.”

AGENCY

The agency that I chose that I thought best described me was ownership and responsibility. I would say I consistently take responsibility of my actions, and I take ownership when I mess up. An example would be when I accidentally spelt Oregon “Oregan”. I took ownership and fixed that mistake.

ENGAGEMENT

I think engagement is one of the success behaviours that applies to me, because majority of these checkboxes apply to me. The one I’d say applies to me the most is helpfulness, because I try to as helpful to other learners as possible, and try to set a positive place in my groups. I also think I represent enthusiasm, because I get excited about things, like when I’m tired at exhibitions, I get super hyper and excited, but if I’m hungry I’m just low power mode.

CONDUCT AND INTEGRITY

I also think that Conduct and Integrity applies to me because I take leadership when needed, like during the spring exhibition when Brooklyn took a break and some people in my group were messing around, I kind of took leadership and told everyone to focus and when a few people were on their break then they were supposed to, I ran both stations.

Humanities

My favourite project was probably the Oregon project, with the driving question being “How does language inspire adventure?”. The PLP 8s went on a trip to Oregon (that I wasn’t part of) and they visited cheese factories, an aquarium, and stayed at a cool cabin/lodge thing!

I really liked this project because of the point of the exhibition. I liked the designing part and I liked how we got to design ads. I could definitely work a bit on accepting criticism because if someone told me that my ad looked weird or I needed to change something I would get of annoyed because I worked really hard on it and to hear someone say your work needs to be better kind of hurts.

My favourite part of the designing process was making the merch because there weren’t really at boundaries, and I’m really happy that my group liked by merch that I made!

While my classmates were in Oregon, me and Tyler worked on a book! It’s basically a PLP 8 adventure book. It has little challenges for us to do every day that they are gone. For instance, one day was researching a food you’ve never tried!

PLP 8 Adventure Book

Science

In science, we did multiple different projects to showcase our learning. My personal favourite was making character cards for the immune cells! We learned about the t-cells, antibodies, b-cells (my personal fav), macrophages and etc!

I did a deeper delve on my blog post here! 

We also made games using a website called scratch. It was about the kinetic molecular theory! I really liked doing this because of how it let us express our creativity. You can also play the game here!

Maker

Destination Imagination happened 2 times this year. My group was Julia, Carmyn, Ian, Sam. We wanted to incorporate what we learned about medieval times into our skit, but we didn’t know how! We decided to use Greek Mythology instead.

Unfortunately for us, Evelyn had to leave to Japan, so for the 2nd one, we had to switch it up. Instead of Athena (Evelyn) we turned Sam into Aphrodite as he didnt have many lines before.

Thanks for listening to my last ever presentation of learning!

Hello! This my is mom, Shannon Cheung

 PoL Declaration

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.

It’s The End of The World as we know it 🌎💣

This was our first “project”. Our goal was to make a song using the song It’s the “End of the world as we know it’s instrumentals” and beats and make the lyrics about our transition from Elementary school to High School.  My group was Julia and Sam. Here’s our final Music Video!

The Book of the Lion📖🦁

This book that we had to read for humanities was called the Book of the Lion. It was quite honestly one of the worst books I’ve ever read. It was so boring and the theme didn’t call to me. It was about the Crusades and the main character was a guy who fought in the Crusades named Edmund. This book was so sexist and boring it’s everything a book SHOULDN’T BE.

Working with Words🏋️🔤

This project was really hard because we had to write poems about our worldview, like haikus, metaphorical poems, simile poems and etc. I hate writing poems because I like expressing myself in different ways. After we finished all our poems we made a digital book using Book Creator. The only thing I liked was the customization of the book because we got to choose the fonts, and colours of your book.

Winter Exhibition❄️🗻

This was by far my favourite project of the semester. The goal was to make a triptych, which is a 3 piece picture. We had to do 3 scenes to show our knowledge of Medieval, Renaissance, and Contemporary history. For the medieval scene. My group was pretty good, and I got closer with my friends. I think our triptych was amazing and I was so proud of everything we did.

 

My Growth as a Learner📈🤓

I think I definitely grew as a learner, because at the beginning of the year I used to not give my projects my all, but now I put as much work into my projects as I can. I also used to be very against projects by myself

Going to tutorial

I think to grow as a learner a lot, I need to go to tutorial more often to catch up on work that I’m behind on, especially if I missed a few days. Tutorial is super important because you need to catch up on work that you have missed, or if you just fell behind.

Science 

For science this semester, we had Ms. Kadi who is such an amazing teacher! She teaches well, while also being kind and making the class have a fun and safe environment. She always makes every single class fun and entertaining, while still being educational. The first project was to make a video game to show our knowledge of the Kinetic Molecular Theory. I chose to do a fun task game, you can check the game and how I made it here. Now we are learning about cells and we get to use microscopes to see organisms!

Humanities

We had a ton of teachers for Humanities so I’ll name them all. Right now we have Ms. McWilliam who is a lot of fun and is really interesting to listen to. We had Ms. Madsen who is so funny and amazing and she taught really well. Next we had Ms. Willemse who was amazing at teaching and makes the class laugh a lot. Humanities is probably the hardest PLP class, and the reason why I hate being sick, because one class, and you’ve fallen behind. Still the projects were still really fun!

Maker!

This was one of my favourite PLP classes (we only have 3) but it was still really fun. Mr Harris taught us how to use Keynote and we made super cool things like a custom Nike shoe, and other stuff! 

   

PLP is practically teaching you how to do every single job. What now?! Being an author of course! 

Mr Hughes came in to teach us all about using AR Makr, which was the app we would use to make our story come to life! I’ll explain: it uses your camera and your images you’ve drawn and you can place your images anywhere in your room! It was actually pretty cool to use!

Now we had to complete the Story Mountain sheet, with the Rising Action, Climax, and etc. Here’s mine

We had to do a lot of work on Causes and Consequences. Here’s my chart that we had to fill out.

Pirate Paks!

The best part of this project was that we got pirate paks from white spot! The entire class was just eating and playing Kahoot! It was definitely the best humanities class we had. I wasn’t here on Monday, and that’s when they ordered at school, but Madeline wasn’t here, and so she said I could have hers. I paid her back obviously, but I was so happy, because I was going to be starving!

Next thing, we started to draw. I wanted Mijuvious to look like a snotty blonde (not all blondes are snotty, but in the Age of Exploration most rich people had blonde hair) and for Zestiandal to have brown hair. Next I searched on Google for a man in a suit and a man in a farmer outfit, and I traced and coloured. Done! Next up, the items. I wanted a match pack, a hammer and a wooden boat originally, but when I started to place my items, I realized how many more items I would need. Once that was all done, I drew a few more things and now it’s time to assemble!

 

I put everything in AR Makr, then filmed, and then I put it into CapCut to crop some parts and add my voiceover. Once everything was completed, I could finally breathe! Here’s the story!

Have you ever heard of Destination Imagination? It’s a big thing in PLP, that the teachers really hype up! Well I have just finished the regionals round of Destination imagination and I felt like I was going to die!

My reflection

To start Destination Imagination was kind of underwhelming because I thought it would be just… better. The teachers hyped it up a lot and it what kind of sad because I thought it would be more crazy. I think provincials will be a lot more interesting because there are more schools that will be there to compete with. My group wants to redo our entire script but I think it will be very hard to do that. Our rose was that our props actually came together really well. There was some humour in our play which made the audience laugh. I think Julia and Evelyn did a lot not work and rarely got distracted, and they also brought our entire thing together, so I give them props for that. 

I left Saturday feeling so tired. People say, oh it was only at 8 minute performance, not a lot of time! But they don’t know how long we had to stay at school, bored and planning more. I want to make our performance way better and I’m going to work even more hard to get it done.

Some thorns were that a few hours before we preformed, someone knocked down our cloud so it was broken. It took a lot of improvisation but we were able to get our cloud working, but as soon as we finished preforming, it fell down, so now we are going to have to either make the entire thing again, or hot glue the thing, which made be really really mad at that person, even though I didn’t show it. 

Costumes, Costumes, Costumes

We left this very last minute, and came with consequences. Our costumes looked really sloppy, and for Julia, Evelyn, and Sam, they had to pin a pillow case to their white t-shirts, which looked really weird. I had a pretty good costume, since Julia had a gladiator costume from a Halloween costume. Ian bought a costume the day before the performance and it was all chaos. After our preformance, we couldn’t even leave. I was starving cause I didn’t think it would be that long, but

luckily Elsa gave me ramen to eat and

we all played Roblox like one big happy family. We also are very proud of our props, as we spent several days on them.

This project was really fun. It combined our knowledge of the kinetic molecular theory and our love of games into a science game! I used to really love those games where you find the items around the room around and they want to use that in my game. I also wanted to incorporate the states of matter into my game. 

The website we used was *Scratch, a coding website that was very easy for beginners. A few things I didn’t like were how often games would glitch and many of my friends complained of that as well. One of my friends even had hers deleted and had to restart. It’s a good one for beginners, just watch out for the glitches, and be prepared if it deletes. 3.5 stars!

I started off by grabbing a table off of Google that was if course, it’s Creative Commons licensed. I grabbed an ice cube, and a flask of water and we were set with our main ingredients. Once that was done I got a bowl image, and wanted to make it so that when you tap it, your task you appear. Luckily for me it was that hard to figure out since using Scratch is so easy. I’m not going to talk over the entire process, but it was a tedious one for sure.

Testing other people’s games!

One persons game that everyone wanted to try was Eloise’s! Hers was kind of like geometry dash, except it’s just jumping over one thing and it keeps coming, but it was really, hard, and I still haven’t beaten it yet… the link to her blog is here so you can try to beat it too!

 

How to play!

My game is the simplest thing before Kraft Mac N Cheese. You start off with a task, turning ice cubes into steam! Grab the ice cube and out it into your bag, then press the arrow to head over to the science lab! Fun fact, the photo was taken in my actual science classroom! Grab a pot, and drag it to your bag as well! Then you go to the stove and turn it on. Then you at the ice cube and click and BAM! STEAM!!!

Conclusion 

This was one of best PLP projects I’ve done! It made learning super fun and I would definitely recommend to other classes! 8.9/10!

Poems… we have what you call a hate-hate relationship. I was absolutely dreading this project as Ms Willemse was talking about presenting it at a coffee house?! I’m not ready to take my career as a poet that far yet!

Becoming an author!

Ms Willemse had explained that our next project would be about poetry. As expected, almost the entire class groaned, including me! I hated poetry and I thought it was a waste of time. Until this project. I realized how much work goes into poetry! From designing a book, to making sure each poem is fulled with expression and meaning, I now respect poets! 

First thing we did was make our poems. The types of poems we did were similes, metaphors, haikus, sound poems, found poems, experiences poems and our Self Portrait poem. Keep reading t’il the end because I have a link to my eBook where you can read my poems!

Next we make an about me video for our eBook, to give the readers an idea of what kind of person you are and what you like! I put in my favourite colours, foods and what sport I play. 

I’m not gonna keep this post too long because I need room for my book, so I’m gonna finish quick.

The last things we did were adding voice overs, and customizing our eBooks to our likings. I chose to go for this bubblegum coloured background and a boho style cover. 

I honestly liked this project a lot! It made me grow as a writer to try different types of writing, and I’m excited to experiment with different writing styles!

My eBook!

The teachers have been hyping us up ALL YEAR FOR THIS! What was it you might be thinking? A tryptic! “And what is that?!” Read more to find out!

What In The World Is A Triptych?!

Before I explain what this big event was, you need to know what a triptych and a tableau is. “What? There’s another one?!” Yup, but don’t worry, it’s easy to understand! A triptych is a painting of 3 images side by side, the most important one being bigger and in the middle. A tableau is where people pose as an image or painting! You might have seen that tableau scene in Modern Family. Now that you have your vocabulary, let’s get to the real project!

The Good Old Days!

When your parents say, “Back in my day” they probably mean around the 90’s, but we went WAYYYYY FURTHER BACK. As in Medieval times. Yeah, the Dark Ages. We also visited the Renaissance times and back to our current timeline. 

Our Group’s Triptych

To get a better sense of what we did in this project, here’s a photo of our triptych. It looks pretty good doesn’t it? Well it’s kind of hard to see, but read til the end to see our final tableau!

Renaissance Paragraph Explaining My Art

Learning about the Renaissance helps me reflect on how lucky we are that we now have the opportunity to learn.
In my artwork I show how we learned so much from things. I added in a man writing down something in a book. We were able to learn so much from the past from people writing down things that happened during their times. In the Renaissance times, Christians would read their bibles and believed in what happened during that time. All because of some people deciding to write about the god that they believed in, over 2 billion people read about it and converted to Christianity. We learn recipes from cookbooks, and we learn about gardening from gardening books.
I decided to add a mechanical clock to my artwork for time, as it was important in day to day life in Renaissance times, and still to this day. I use a clock every day as I use it so I know when to go to bed, when to get up, and when I should leave for school. The people in the Renaissance always depended on clocks for their schedules, and the mechanical clock being invented made it a quite bit easier. Additionally, they didn’t have to use sundials anymore, because sundials couldn’t be used at night, or on rainy days.

For economy I added a picture of 2 people counting up money. I thought this would be a good choice because that picture could relate to the government. They are kind of like tax collectors, greedy for money, and they take people’s hard earned money. I think that these people were really mean and horrible people, because these people didn’t deserve to get their money taken.The government takes our money for taxes, but it’s to support the government.

Conclusion: Our artworks helped us understand Renaissance worldview because it showed allthe things that happened during the Renaissance, and that has helped us

Who Were They Again…?

To break everything down simply, for the first tableau, I was speaking to the audience and explaining the piece. For Renaissance times, I was an indulgence seller. For the third one, modern, I was a supermarket cashier. Elsa was a peasant giving taxes, a peasant buying indulgences, and a person buying things from the store. Griffin was a king, and for the second and third one, he went inside a prop that me Elsa and Eloise made, kind of like one of those Photo Booth things where you stick your head in the frame! Daniel was an apprentice to Isaac, then was praying with Isaac to the Catholic church, and in modern he was someone using Wikipedia. Isaac was a master to Danny, and praying to the church, then was speaking in modern time. Eloise was a tax collector, speaking in Renaissance and a scientist.

Props-and costumes!

In order to make a good tableaux, we of course, needed costumes! For our first one, the medieval one, we needed a king. Griffin (of course) stepped up for the role of a king. He need a weapon of some sort, such as a spear! He also needed a costume fit for a king. He brought in a king robe and a crown! I’m not going to go into that much detail or you would be reading for 30 minutes, but we had a medieval church in the background. I wore an apron when I was the cashier. Elsa wore normal peasant looking clothes, but changed in modern. Eloise wore normal clothes, but then changed in a lab coat. Danny and Isaac both wore medieval looking clothes, and then Danny changed to modern clothing. Me Elsa and Eloise wanted to get our team ahead in the game, so we stayed up late at Elsa’s house making props. We made the Catholic Church/Apple HQ, the grocery conveyer belt, the indulgence sign, the sundial, and other smaller things. 

How Our Project Turned Out!

Here are some photos of the finished results on the day of the exhibition!

I actually enjoyed doing this project a lot because it gave us a lot of freedom and creativity to do what came to our brains! I’m super excited for the spring exhibition!