Well, this is the end. The end to everything. The end to Grade 8. The end to all the work in Grade 8……….

Hello, this is my second to last blog post. So what is TPOL? It stands for transition presentation of learning. It’s similar to mPOL, wait, make sure you check that blog post out before you continue to read. The mPOL is basically a summary of what I learned before January. If you already did, than you should know what TPOL is. Except the content is a little bit different. TPOL is a 7 minute presentation and 5 minutes at the end for questions. You have to do the presentation in front of your parents and teacher. The topic of the TPOL is your Growth as a Learner. You have to talk about how you grown as a learner and what you learned. The main focuses are content, which is worldview, focus, which is story telling, medium, which is still image, message, which is presentation. There is only two projects we did that had all three, the explorer project and the tempest project.

Since the start of Grade 8 my main goal was to get better at presenting in front of teachers and peers. I felt like I’ve done a good job on that. I used the skills I learned in Drama to apply it to my presentation skills. It helps a lot. Some work that show my learning includes most of the things we’ve done. The latest one is probably the tempest tableau. It’s also part of storytelling which I will explain in a bit. In science and math, we used a lot of our presentation skills. We recently had to present a playground structure that we made. Overall, I think my confidence and presentation skills has definitely improved. By the way, here’s my group’s science presentation keynote.

Now let’s move onto still image. Still image is in the grade 8 PLP curriculum I’m guessing because basically every project I’ve done includes still image. When I mean basically everything I mean basically everything. From what I know of, still image can explain things that you can’t verbally. The tableau we had to do had background images because we weren’t allowed to talk and we used the background to show where we are and what we were doing. I also learned a lot about using the apps such as superimpose and comic life. I also learned how to use photoshop on the computer because I used it for one of my art projects. Still images can be really fascinating sometimes. Here is the tempest performance.

https://youtu.be/oWCMY6vHVaM

Now, let’s talk about storytelling. What did I learn, how did I improve? Well, for some of our projects, we had to tell a story. Or should I say all of them? I mean, we have to write blog posts right? Some blog posts can be a story. It may not be very interesting but it reflects our learning through a process and that process can create a story. Your gonna hear me mention this a lot but for our tempest project, all three things were included. Storytelling, still image and presentation. From the start of grade 8 till now, I’ve learned how to write blog posts, how to create a comic, and how to create a tableau. All of those contain a story. We than tell the story on our blog posts. So what your reading now is a story about my grade 8 life and what I improved.

That would’ve been a good ending but I can’t end the story here. I have to keep going. Let’s talk about some projects that I really thought I did well on. There are three main projects. The science project (the one with the keynote shown above), the infographic project, and DI. For the science project, my group wasn’t prepared at all on the day of the presentation. Since time ran out, my group didn’t get to go. We also had the Blue Sky  exhibition that day and we didn’t have much time. I woke up early in the morning to do some work and Jason, one of the group members, finished the model. When we got to present, everything went well. The second project is the infographic project. Our task was to make an infographic. It took my group multiple tries but we came out with an amazing infographic. It looked extremely real and i really like it. Onto the last part. The DI part. DI stands for Destination Imagination. We had to make a Solution to a problem and than present it. It was like a tournament against other schools. I won’t spoil much about it but I will say some of the things. The regionals tournament for DI wasn’t really exciting. My group messed up a lot. But when it got to Provincials, it was only Kiera and I. I felt like we did extremely well. We didn’t come top three but since it was only a two person team, 5th was good enough for me. 

From the start of Grade 8 till now, I felt like my learning improved. Humanities has never been my strength because I came he when I was seven and I didn’t know much English. During the past 6 years, my English has improved. I got my first ever A in Grade 8 and I felt great. Some work I think I did well are the comic explorers presentation, I got to get to know better about comic life. I also did a triptych blog post that I thought it was pretty good. Also, I felt like I can use the IPad a lot better and know a lot of it’s features. For Maker, I learned what a Growth Mindset is and what a fixed mindset is. I felt like I did good on that too.

For me, this was a very successful year. Since Grade 7, my goal was to get an A in English and I accomplish that in term 2. My goal was never to get straight A’s but obviously that would be great. To me, straight A’s is nothing special. What is special to me is what I’ve learned. The marks aren’t as important to me. If you get an A and forget what you’ve learned, it’s basically getting an F. Next year, I hope to continue to improve my work habits and as well as my presentation skills. I also want to keep I improving my English skills and math skills. I can use my skills now and develop as I keep going. Well, I guess that wraps up another presentation of learning blog post. Bye.