Take your kid to work day: Lots of food

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At the start of November all of the people in grade 9 had a “Take your kids to work day”. To start off here is the driving question.

“How does experiencing a workday shape our view of career choices”

Now you may be asking where did I go? I went to a very nice restaurant called Milestones. My mom is the manager there so I got a lot of perks like… food. Now I didn’t just sit back in an office all day because that would be boring. Instead I was running food, sometimes cooking, and seating tables. To start off we got in around a hour before it opened and started setting up all the tables and the bar. Then I had some breakfast and got to work. I started off as a host for a few hours greeting people, seating tables, and also cleaning said tables. It was really busy at first but then started getting slower so I moved onto the next thing. 

Next I went back in the kitchen and watched and starting cooking some food. First I watched the chef make a good looking burger and fries. It was to send a picture into the higher ups to see if they are making it right. But besides that next actually made and ate some food. It was chicken in a cream sauce with a type of noodles and veggies. It was very good and is one of my favourite things to order there. 

Next I had to interview my mom for this project and have certain questions. We also had to make a video about the day and post it to YouTube. I think my editing was good for my skill level and my shots of the restaurant. I also had to send an email to her after the fact. Here is the video.

In conclusion, I think I would like to work in a restaurant late maybe not forever but just a little bit. This experience was really fun and I had a great time. Thank you for reading this post.

My absolutely cool T-POL

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The 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.

To start things off

It’s not hard to realize that I have indeed really grown since the first few days of school if you look at some of my newer work compared to my older work. This was achieved by setting some goals to keep me on track. For example I have to finish something by a certain timeframe. That kinda worked, I’m not the best person for being proficient but I can still get something done.

To add on I would say I’m resilient. No matter how bad a project was I still try to fix it to the best I can. I stride for just an okay on most assignments this mostly happens in science with almost every assignment being okay. Another thing is that I come to class ready to learn. I come with the material that we were supposed to do a couple days or the night before. I am on time and don’t miss classes only if I’m sick. You must be asking why I am saying all these things well you had to choose some of these topics from the PLP success behaviours. There’s a bunch of category’s to choose from but 2 had to be from agency. Here are those success behaviours now.

Growth

I talked a little bit about growth at the start but I am going to talk about it more now. If you look back on one of the first things we did In maker becoming a PLP learner and all the drawing you had to do and some of my newer things in humanities like the ads where you can see an improvement on my technical skills. You can see where my editing skills came in handy from one of our projects where we did a small portion with super impose X. For the first draft of the ad I proposed the original photo where the sky was completely cloudy and the water was grey. With my handy work I added in a new sky and water. Although it doesn’t look the best I think I did a pretty good job.

More work ethic

Again I talked about this at the beginning and i will talk more about it here. There are so many things that want to distract you from doing the work at hand and might give into these things. But if you start doing it habits like work for a certain amount of time then have a break for 5 minutes it really improves your work ethic.

A highlight of the year

One of the good things to happen this year was winning second and first place in DI. For this my group and I needed to build a machine to launch a beanbag a certain amount of meters. The first tournament we won first in this category but only won second in it the next time around. The thing we got first in was the instant challenge for being the engineering team with the best teamwork and I can’t really talk about the other thing.

I hope you liked my T-POL and the end

THE SPRING EXHIBITION and the Stanley cup final

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Well this is cool, my first exhibition ( that I’ve been to). Unlike the first time where we had a few months to prepare we got told about it the week before. We had one full week to try our best and meet the expectation. Before we start this was our driving question “ How does language inspire adventure?” Now what does that mean. 

Well I interpret it as different places have other languages except for English. It may be an adventure to learn these languages and different cultures. To learn more of this we went to Oregon for a week! We did a lot of cool things there some of them being going to lots of buffets, the Hatfield marine science centre, and the Tillamook creamery. These places were really cool and I also got some souvenirs including a hoodie.

Why am I telling you about Oregon if this post is about a exhibition is that we had to do the exhibition about Oregon. We had to take pictures while we were in Oregon and made ads about it. Before we left we learnt a bit about placements, right colouring and how to make a proper ad. This whole project has been about ads since the very start. To start off with the project we did a hike to take some pictures to create a first draft of an ad. For the duration of the trip we had to make a book all about Oregon which was pretty cool. More about that later for now here is my ad for Oregon.

For the exhibition my group created some Oregon merch like hoodies and water bottles to go along with the ads. Sadly they didn’t get printed but everything else went fine. We had to tape paper to a wooden board to make it look good while some other groups got blue boards where they didn’t have to do anything to. To make our station a little more exiting we made a game. It’s essentially beer pong but without the beer. It was a circle of cups but in the middle there was one red cup. If you made it into one of the outside cups you have to do a challenge and you get a brownie. But if you made it into the red cup you don’t have to do a challenge and you get a cake pop. We also had a thing with shells. They are supposed to resemble shells we found on the many beaches we went to in Oregon. One of our group members talked about the shells and some facts.

Sadly I don’t have any pictures of the exhibition because we weren’t allowed phones out. But we did get a break for 15 minutes after a couple hours where I watched the hockey game. It was game 3 of the Stanley cup final the Edmonton oilers vs the Florida panthers. Sadly the oilers lost that game but the next game they won with 8 goals to 1 after being 3 games to none a must win for the oilers.

In conclusion I was very tired after the exhibition and went to bed. The exhibition was on a Thursday so I too wake up early for the last day before the weekend. Was this project fun? YES it was and I would highly recommend. Also here is my book of Oregon

Some Cells and some vaccines

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This project was without a doubt the longest project out of every project I’ve done. This project was all about cells and their function like the white blood cell. So this blog post isn’t 50 years long I will just talk about the big things we did this project. The first big thing draw or find a picture of a cell that we were assigned and do a presentation about it.

 

Me and the person I worked with got assigned the cell membrane and the cytoplasm. Many people were lazy and just found pictures where I took the time to draw all the intricate details of the cells. We had to wright about What the cells grow in, describe the function of the cell(s), and an analogy of the function. This really didn’t require much work just some internet searching and plenty of time drawing ( almost a hour ) and labeling and all the information was done. Now I did the drawing and the most part of the information while my partner did the designing of the slides in Canva.

The next thing we did was SWAB THE SCHOOL! We had to go around with Petri dishes and cotton swabs and swab stuff. But first we had to make a question mine was “What has more bacteria something that isn’t often touched or something that is often touched”. I tested a bathroom door handle hand a closet door just the door not the handle. All of this work and for what A BOOK more specifically a field journal. As you might have guessed the door handle had more bacteria by a long shot like so much more. Surprisingly by the final day the closet door had some mold on it and other little yellow and red dots. The bathroom handle had a lot of fuzzy big round circles on the surface. Without further ado here is the book.

Field Journal Template

The next thing we did was about the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. Some properties of the innate immune system that help us are, eyelashes, tears, and nose hair. All of these things help to keep bad things out of the body but what if they get in? That’s where the adaptive immune system comes into play. The white blood cell is the most known of the cells but there are others that help like the T-cells. There are 3 types of T-cells, the helper T-cell, memory T-cell, and the killer T-cell. They all have important properties to the adaptive immune system like warning the body, help killing the pathogen, and remembering the pathogen. There are others like the B-cell which produces Antibodies to help the macrophage eat the cell after the T-cells have killed it. With all this new found information we had to make what is basically Pokémon cards. We needed to draw the cells and add information about them. Now we didn’t need to make them look like cells you could just put a stick man and call him joe. Well obviously you can’t just do that you need to put some effort into the drawing and the names. What I did was I drew the outline of cells and drew sports teams logo’s that I know on them and some of them look really good.

Sports team cells

Just about the last thing we learnt about this project was vaccines. We learnt all about different types of vaccines and how they were made like the alive and dead vaccines. The alive vaccines were made with alive cells of the pathogen that the vaccine was for. The dead vaccine was made of a bunch of dead pathogens that the vaccine was for. One of the most popular uses and the first inactivated vaccine was the polio vaccine developed in 1955 by Dr. Jonas Salk. Another instance of a vaccine is the subunit vaccine. The subunit vaccine is when the chop up very small pieces of the virus and create a vaccine from it.

From all this knowledge of vaccines we had to make a media campaign where we had to talk about a popular theory about vaccines. Like one of them microchips in vaccines and me personally I did how vaccines do NOT cause autism. These news letters were cool to make and do research on to find out why people believe this. For the first ad I actually got a tip from a friend which was that Canva had an AI image generator to generate specific images. I requested for syringes because there was no really good ones on the internet. So with all the build up here is the campaign.

What is colonization to you?

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Unlike my last post that had a little bit of colonization in it ( other post link ) this project is fully about colonization. Perhaps I should talk a little more about “What where the consequences of colonization” which was the driving question to this project. There were many consequences being land taken away, residential schools, and even some good ones like would we really be hear today without it.

In this first part I will talk about the land. When the Europeans first started building in the Americas it was 1608 and the city in question was Quebec. When Samuel de Champlain went to the America’s he didn’t think of it just for trading he saw a fresh start from Europe. This began many wars and treaties I will talk about later. In just the span of 100 years almost 50% of Canada was owned by the Europeans and now almost all of Canada is owned with some exceptions of refuges for indigenous people.

Now I will talk about the wars. The first major war taking place was the one between the Europeans and the Iroquois. Now the Europeans had other indigenous tribes as allies for the war so they had more people. The Iroquois were severely unmatched by the standards of how they only had wooden weapons while the Europeans had guns. This war came with lots of death and the torturing of how many. This war lasted between 1688 – 1697. The war that came before this was the beaver war. What turned from gathering pelts turned into a Great War. As many more Europeans came many more beavers were being killed.

With the decline of beaver population came the hunger for more pelts. From this war beavers almost went extinct which was not very good. From this war many died from the years 1609 – 1701. Mainly the Iroquois died from the addition of guns.

Later on in 1831 residential schools started popping up. Residential schools were made to strip culture away from indigenous people resulting in a lot of death. Residential schools were one of the things that most impacted Canada with gradually finding unmarked graves. These schools lasted from 1831 – 1996 so just about 165 years before the last one was burned and destroyed.

 

Now with all this new found knowledge we were put into groups of three to eventually present a slideshow. This slideshow needed to include some strong factors of colonization like ethnocentrism. Here are the links to both of their blogs, Sven’s blog, Cole’s blog. These partners went on for a while creating notes in one shared document for 2 or 3 weeks. This Was real fun because we got to pick our groups, well got to suggest some people for the teacher to decide. I think my group did pretty well and I will post the slideshow at the end of the blog.

After we finished the presentations we got pretty much the final task to make a 2 slide slideshow with 3 words on each. The upside was we got to use notes to help remember what we are talking about. To my knowledge I think my friend and I did a pretty good job. Forgot to mention that it was an individual slideshow not in groups like the other one. 

So in this post I talked about some properties of consequences of colonization and long lasting effects. I do hope you liked this post mainly of colonization and I will see your in the next one. 

Consequences of colonization

A surprise post. MPOL’S

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Words of wisdom (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.

What was first

Now First we have probably the most important project and one of my personal favourites the blogging challenge. After every project we have to wright a blog post about the project and without this project there wouldn’t be any blog posts which is really sad. This project taught me how to format and how to make good blog post ready for review. This project also told me how to make the blog besides from the posts which is the most important part. 

My favourite thing I’ve done🎮

My favourite thing I’ve done was indeed my scratch game which was really fun to code and. Build.

Continue reading »

A silly pirate story.

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A plundering beginning 

Having to make 3 blog posts in 1 week is very time consuming and a long process. But in this project I’m going to talk about a project that was just OK and thankfully not that much homework this time. But besides that in this project we learned about how European explorers got to the America’s and a little about pirates. A very interesting topic to write about and could even be converted into a story. So the very first thing we did in this project was we had to right a paragraph of more about a made up pirate or Viking story now of course I chose to write about a pirate. The story I think was about a pirate cursed by a wizard can’t really remember but I think that was it if not I don’t really care.

Gadgets and gizmos 

The next big thing we did in this project was learning about different items they used to navigate the open ocean. These items included a compass, a astrolabe, a cross-staff, and the back-staff. These items were important to sailing because they were using the stars to navigate before then. It gave them a sense of direction to get to their destination in the times of old, the cross staff and others is kinda like gps when there were no satellites to give off signals or modern technology to help them. Another revolutionary item for the time was a sailing ship in the name of the caravel.

Different types of ships

Now the caravel was different to all other ships because the caravel was smaller and had a shallower keel, also having triangular sails. This was important to sail upriver of against a current of water, also with the sails attached it was much more maneuverable and could sail closer to shore. Even more facts because the sails were triangles the caravel could move super fast beating all other ships by far which was very helpful to getting to destinations fast. Now with other ships they were big, bulky and very hard to sail upriver or against a current so why even get other ships.

The cause and the consequences

The next thing we did was we learned a bit about the cause and consequences of explorations. An example of this is the Europeans needed new materials, they traded pelts with the first people (this would be short term consequence), this lead to the Colombian exchange of all new spices and animals (long term). Now these consequences were mostly good but some we pretty bad like trading slaves and converting people to Christianity. If I keep talking about these this post will be too long so here’s some pictures.

The invention of my story

Now we knew that eventually we would be writing a story with it being 4-5 minutes long which is kinda a long time for a short story. So we started off writing a story mountain with enough detail to it that you could use it the full story. Now after that bit that I had to redo a couple of times it was time to make pictures for our final video. This process took some time of tracing and finding good photos to trace that goes with the story. So after all that work I went outside one sunny day placed down all of my pictures on an app called AR maker that we had to do it on. I filmed went home and recorded voice lines. Finally I was done and here is that video.

The big driving question🏎️

Now the question is How can we use storytelling to investigate what sparked global exploration and understand its impact? Now by telling story’s of different lands it could influence more people to go exploring thus leading to most of the world being found.

The road to Destination and imagination

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The very start

Now that the first tournament of this project “the regionals” is over, gone, dusted we have to make a what I assume to be a pretty long post for how long the setup was for the tournament was so I’m going to get into it. To start things off in I think December we got our challenge types and teams where we met all our team mates and started planning. We had about 30 minutes to look over the rules and see the dimensions that we needed for the item. Now I haven’t exactly told you what challenge option my team and I got, we got probably the most fun challenge engineering. For engineering this year we had to make a launching device that launches a pretty heavy bean bag about 14 oz so kinda heavy. To make this device we had a budget of $200 to buy all of the materials including props and materials to build with, plus paints.

The grim reality of meeting up.

A couple months into the project our group had to meet up regularly to build the device and make props. Now I missed a lot of the meeting because I was sick A LOT but at the very end a few weeks before I did come to the meetings and dress rehearsals. At these meetings I was told that they made the modular device and some other important props during these meeting’s but I really couldn’t do anything about it seeing that I was on the verge of death. Plus one of the times was a dress rehearsal that was at the school and was kind of disappointed that I couldn’t come and help. Now taking place a little more than half way way to the tournament which was on a Saturday taking up the entire day which I was not very thrilled about that but I’m going to talk about that later. Now things were getting serious, one of our group members created a script for all of us and luckily I only had 4 lines :).

Scripts and robots.

Now about a week or two after getting our lines one of our group members said we had to miss the tournament to go to another tournament this time for skiing and I had to take the burden of his lines. Now up to six lines with 8 sentences which was very disappointing seeing now that I had to memorize a whole new set of lines. Now with little less than a month until the tournament I actually was free of my relentless sickness and started coming to meetings. In said meeting I worked on memorizing lines and cutting cardboard to make props. When mostly other members of the team started working on the robot costume it was short but complex task. Having to gather a big cardboard box and paint the entire thing then putting cool decorations on it like a ball that lights up when turned on which was pretty cool.

 

The big day

After months of planning and practicing lines it was finally time for the tournament. For my costume I had to wear all white and a dress shirt that I wasn’t too thrilled about seeing that I had to dig it out of my closet. Now arriving at school at 8:30 AM ON A SATURDAY I was very tired and hadn’t memorized all my lines so I had one last run through and it went well. Now with about 30 minutes to go we had to move our props into the room where we were presenting we had time too watch the first team go which was interesting to say the least. Now finally going up and presenting to the appraisers the final presentation and I think we did pretty well.

The verdict

 Now with our presentation being at 9:40 am and the award show being at 2:30 we had just under five hours of doing completely nothing. When it got to around 11:00 am my friends and I went to go have lunch then go play soccer which was amusing. Then after just walking around for a couple of hours we all had to go to the gym to see who won in each division. In engineering and rest of the challenges there was 2 classes intermediate and senior, senior being the older kids. After waiting a while they finally got around to engineering and you won’t believe if I told you. We got first place which was very cool. So finally I got to go home around 3:00 pm and finally get some rest.

Cool facts about Atoms and a very cool video game

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Where it all starts

Well as my first post of the second semester of this year I feel very tired and wanting to go home. But back to the actual project it was one of the more funnier ones since it’s not all on an iPad. This project consisted of finding out properties of the atom and other science things. Right now I’m going to talk about the different types of labs we did and what we used to do them so lets start.

The first lab we did was not with different types of chemicals and dry substances we weighed some heavy objects with a quadruple beam balance. This scale is a really accurate scale of weighing not too heavy things the max it can measure is 321 grams which is enough to weigh some things like a tiny metal cube. We measured a small metal cube, a rectangle, and metal circle with a hole in it so all pretty light. You would think that is really easy but its kinda difficult, you have to move the blocks weighing from 100 g to 1 g to the different points in the beam to make the heavier. The final thing we measured was a 250 ml beaker with 100 ml first we had to measure how heavy the beaker was which the beaker was 109.7 g and sadly my partner and I didn’t have the time to get an accurate reading on the water and sadly we had to put it away.

The cool part

Now somewhat through the project we got to do something real fun. A lab with direct chemicals that we can mix together to make different things. The materials consisted of baking soda, corn starch, sugar, salt, and a mystery substance that we learned at the end was flour. Now we didn’t just mix these things together that would be boring so we got a couple of different liquids and one pretty cool thing that consisted of water, vinegar, iodine, and fire. Now the water with all of them didn’t do much but the vinegar and iodine did something that was cool. With the m=baking soda it fizzed out of the beaker and we had to clean it up. Also with the iodine if you add in sugar it turns orange which is kinda cool but if you add a bit too much of baking soda or cornstarch and the stuff like that it clumps up and you can mold it. With the fire it really just melted everything but with some things it made the flame way bigger.

A little bit before that we did a different kind of measurement. You took a graduated cylinder filled it half of the way with water and put random metal objects in and measured it to see how much the water rises. My partner and I put a nail and a small long metal block in, the nail didn’t really raise it that much but the cylinder raised almost to the top and that’s really all the volume lab was just put different things in the graduated cylinder.

The big finale 

Now for the first project of science the final thing we had to do had to be fun since the driving question was “How can we communicate our knowledge of atoms in a fun and creative way” we had to make a video game. Now we didn’t have to make a 3d hyper realistic open world game no we used scratch that sometimes doesn’t work how it should. Now when we started the video game I wasn’t there because a was sick but that’s not the point. I was a week late on the project but nothing to despair I finished the gamed with ample days to spare. Now after I told you this you might be asking what game did I make well I made a soccer game. We had to use are knowledge of atoms to make a game what I did was I put cool facts about the atom in the game and atoms are all around us when we move, when we kick a ball and so on. So without further ado here is the game and I hope you like it.

The horrifying world of poems

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By the title you can probably guess that this project was all about poems and their styles. This was definitely the shortest project we’ve done so far with it lasting under one month. With this being the last project of the semester we had to do something big to get the attention of the class ( that is not what happened ). First we learned about a poet laureate. A poet laureate is a person chosen by the Librarian of Congress who ever that is. After that we started learning how to make a good poem and what’s involved to make a good one. We were given a list of poems and had to list the similes and metaphors and things like that. After that long process we got in to the bad part WRITING THE POEMS!

The first set of poems we had to make was the simile poem ( a poem full of similes ) and the metaphor poem ( a poem full of metaphors ) and we had to have these poems ready for the next day. now there are 9 different poems with each being 10 lines or longer would make the post way to long so I will just put my BOOK link at the end. There’s a book but sawyer you didn’t tell us there was a book well when you’ve made all your poems you had to put them all into a book to be presented at a later date. Also I won’t be mentioning much of the poems since they are in the book.

The next thing we did was we got into groups of three and were given en a random sound poem ( a poem made up of random sounds ). My group was given the poem with the name of “ silent poem” my first solution was when we went up to present we don’t say anything given the name put we had to speak. The poem is made up of six parts so we all got to do two of them. So without further ado here is silent poem

Silent Poem

backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk

underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow

woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile

sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep

backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk

candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread

hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup

whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush

gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheelwatercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed

gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock

weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow

by Robert Francis

Next we had to learn a lot of poetry terms which took up half the class just to learn them. I will show them now.

  1. Simile: a comparison of two unlike things using like or as. 

2. Cliche: overly used expression. 

3. rhythm scheme: pattern of rhymes in a poem.

4. Metaphor: a comparison between two unlike things

5. Free verse: a poem without rhythm or rhyme

6. Onomatopoeia: words that sound the way they mean.

7. Denotation: literal definition of a word.

8. Connotation: the associated feelings that come with a word

9. Juxtaposition: two things being seen or placed together with contrasting effect.

10. Haiku: a short three line with 5 syllables in the first line 7 in the second line 5 in the third line.

11. Found poem: poems are created by talking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spaces and lines, or by adding and deleting, and giving it a new meaning.

12. Theme: def = life lesson meaning moral or message about life or human nature that is communicated in literary work text theme is what the story teaches readers. Does not = a word in a sentence. Theme is implied

Now obviously I am leaving a lot of things out of this post but their the same things I’ve talked about or just really boring. So finally I hope you enjoyed my post and come back for more oh and here’s the book.

A new book