Mpol

In humanities we started off with a project (like I said before) about people and the environment. The final product for this project would come to be a written letter to someone in charge of something. That letter would have to be about an “environmental crisis” of some kind (ex. Water pollution, rising sea levels, etc.). We immediately started off this project with a “topic pitch” to our teachers about what we want to write about in our letters. I chose to write about forest fires In the Lake Okanagan area. When our teachers told us that we would be doing this in our project I immediately thought of that. I had gone to Penticton that summer and saw a lot of smoke and fires on the way there. Later on we had a conference with our teachers about why we chose to write about what we chose, the audience that we would be writing to, the evidence that something has to change and who it affects. A couple days after that we had Megan Curren a women in municipal government and Denis Thomas the owner of “Takaya tours” in B.C. come in to talk to us about their lives. Wile all of this was going on we were doing activities on a website called “Common lit”. They taught us a lot about how different people are affected by different forms of pollution and climate change. It also taught us a bunch of vocabulary that we would maybe use in our letters. Then it was time to write the letter. It took me 5 tries to get it right, but I eventually got it. The next day we walked to deep cove as a class, we each ate one Tim bit, then mailed our letters. I mailed mine to John Horgan giving him some ways to make it so there are less forest fires in the Lake Okanagan area. Then of course we had to write a blog post about the project. To read it, click this link. https://www.blog44.ca/zacharyv/2021/10/22/do-people-affect-nature/.

Wile we were doing that in humanities, we had a project going on in scimatics too. It was about exponents and at first it seemed like I was the only person In my class who knew what they were. I guess my grade 7 math was different then everyone else’s. The final product for this project was a board game using exponents “in a fun way”. This project pretty much followed the scimatics project path. Starting the final product pretty early, doing a lot of workbook pages, reading a lot of textbook pages, doing some Kan academy quizzes and writing a blog post at the end. This was with a new teacher so I thought it would be different. But the only big changes from our room and Mr. grosses room was that we got to chose our partners. We also somehow ended up having less homework (or at least I did). This project was really fun though. You don’t usually make a board game in math class about something that I find to be very neat.  For this project I chose to work with Luca and we worked pretty well together I found. We had to redo ideas a couple times but we eventually got it right. To read the blog post for this project click this link. https://www.blog44.ca/zacharyv/2021/10/13/a-board-game-made-around-exponents/

This next project that I’m going to talk bout was probably my favourite project of all time in all my years of going to school. The project named “Revolutions on trial” was about exactly as it sounds, a revolution on trial. The final product for this project would come to be a mock trial of two groups saying if a certain revolution was effective or ineffective. We started off this project with a simulation. A simulation where there were 4 groups, each of them portraying a different part of the old social hierarchy. I was lucky and got put into the top part of the “pyramid” where I was the kings right hand man. The one below us were the police, the ones beneath them were the general store workers and the ones beneath them were the news paper writers (I think). We played it out for two days and the lower classes didn’t overthrow us which was good. We then learned about something called “the Crane Brinton diagram”. One of my favourite parts of this project was what came next. We read the book “Animal Farm” by George Orwell and it was one of my favourite books that I’ve read. It was about a farm where all the animals overthrew the owner and kicked him out. A lot of cool things happened in that book so I won’t spoil it for you. But it was actually all based off of the Russian revolution. We then got put into our revolution groups. I got put into the French Revolution and had to convince a jury that it was effective. Spoiler alert, we ended up losing. But before that happened we had to learn as much as we could about the French Revolution so we could try to win. To keep all of our knowledge in a safe place, we put it into a graphic organizer. Our teachers wanted this court case to be as close to a real court case a possible, so they made us make an “affidavit” before the mock trial. We then built the script for the mock trial and like most things in PLP it took us a couple tries but got it right eventually. Then the day of the mock trial came and it was amazing. I had gotten wireless earbuds from one of my friends that day so whenever I wasn’t up on stage I was listening to music. But the whole day was very fun. My parents came to watch me as a lawyer but before I was also a judge for a different revolution group. Then of course we wrote the blog post. To read the blog post for this project click this link. https://www.blog44.ca/zacharyv/2022/01/05/effective-or-ineffective/

At the same time as all of that was happening, we were doing a project in scimatics about statistics. This project was called Correlation vs Causation and it was pretty simple. The final product would come to be a keynote presentation about a survey that we would make about anything really. My partner for this project was Ines and we decided to make a survey comparing how many people went to the beach during the summer and how many people got sunburned during the summer. But of course the reason we had to do the survey was because we had to see if there was a Correlation and or a Causation visible between the two things. We guessed that it would be a causation and it ended up being one. To get the most amount of survey answers we could, we made fliers with a qr code on it that goes to the survey all around the school. We also put it on our social media pages. We ended up getting around 80 answers which was very helpful. It made it so our keynote presentation would be very interesting, which it was. To read the blog post for this project click here. https://www.blog44.ca/zacharyv/2021/11/22/correlation-𝕍𝕊-causation/

Then the last humanities project for this semester. It was called “Working with Words” and was all about poetry. This project was supposed to start a week before it did but a new wave of covid struck so we weren’t able to. Also because of that we got a lot more homework than we were originally supposed to. But I digress. This project was about poetry and learning everything there is to know about how to write it and understand it. The final product for this project would come out to be a poetry book with all of your poems in it. Also an online exhibition of us reading some of the poetry we made to our parents. But before doing that, we had to learn how to write and understand poetry. Throughout this whole project we were learning different poetry terms and writing poems about them. We would get assigned one to do around 1 a day using different styles of poetry. The first one we made was a Simile poem, the second was an extended metaphor poem. The third was a haiku poem, the fourth was a found poem. The fifth was an imagery poem, the sixth was a sound poem. The seventh was an experience poem, the eighth was a personification poem and the last one was a self portrait poem. After learning all of those and more poetry lingo, we started preparing for the (what we called) “Coffee House Performance”. Instead of everyone reading each of their poems, we got split into groups and made one final poem together. Each group got assigned a different style of poem to write and my group got imagery. We only had one day to write it and what we came up with was fantastic. It was about how time controls our everyday life and it really spoke to me. Reading a part of that with my group wasn’t the only thing that I had to do for the coffee house presentation. I had to read the self portrait poem that I made in front of all the parents. Then of course I had the blog post to write. To read the blog post for this project click here. https://www.blog44.ca/zacharyv/2022/01/25/i-prefer-slam-but-this-is-alright-too/

Now the final scimatics project. This project was called “Chemistry Stories” and it was about exactly as it sounds. The final product for this project would come to be an animation we would make about ionic and covalent bonding of elements. To learn what covalent and ionic bonding is click the my blog post link at the bottom of the paragraph. We started off this project how we start off every project, a mind map. We also had a lot of workbook pages to do and textbook pages to read. We also did an experiment which we don’t usually do in scimatics. We also made an animation about our predictions for the experiment. Later on we made a story board and I wanted to be different than everyone else. I made my whole animation based off of two metaphors. For ionic bonding, the metaphor I used was a person giving another person money. For covalent bonding, the metaphor I used was a person moving in with another person so they can share the rent. Then I made the video and to make it, I used a program that I’ve never used before. But I picked it up pretty quick and was done the animation within a week. Then of course we made the blog post. To read the blog post for this project click here. (Insert link here)