“Ever since I was little I have never been a very picky eater. Theres videos of me eating so many different foods, like avocados, broccolini, sardines and other cool foods, that were considered exotic or healthy. As I grew up I’d try foods from new cultures and decide what I liked. I of course dislike some foods, like for example Brussel sprouts, who in the world likes brussel sprouts?! But I’ve never just liked basic food.”

Hiiii and welcome welcome to my maker podcast post!

For this maker project, we were assigned to make a podcast, out of a story, or a journey we’ve gone through. I decided to talk about my current interest in food, how I became so interested in it, and what I found by researching it. I love food so much, and it really fascinates me, so I loved to share my findings about it. 

I think the thing that I was the best at was being passionate about my content, and having my story really be, me! When I can really put my personality into a project, I’m definitely more invested in it. I have developed a few new skills and expanded on my old ones. I’m really glad to have a whole new genre of learning in maker 10, with our audio focussed projects. I decided on my fascinations with food topic pretty much right away, because I knew it was something I was really interested in, and I knew that my knowledge could benefit others.

Here’s my script, which helped me bring my podcast to life:

Fascinations with food-podcast script

The worst part was really having to make my findings more concise, and to people to include everything that I wanted to. I also needed to make sure that my more factual content was still very engaging, and that I didn’t ramble on about all of the facts and numbers. I also feel as though I could have fiddled around with the audio a little bit more, and made it clearer and added more sound effects in to make it even more engaging.

I have expanded on my editing skills, interacted with GarageBand, wrote out a solid interactive script, created engaging cover art and make a new Spotify creator account. I feel as though I could explore GarageBand a bit deeper, I could’ve made my script bit more concise and I hope in the future I’ll be adding to my Spotify creator account.

And so, here is my two part podcast: fascinations with food!

Driving question: How do I craft the story of my learning?

To tell the story of my learning, I started with where my story began, and how I got onto my fascinations with food. Which was something that interested me or a challenge I faced. I shared the important moments that helped me grow. I explained how I handled challenges and what I learned. I talked about how I changed or improved. Finally, I think about how I can use this learning to move forward and set new goals.

Thank you for listening to my podcast, and reading another one of my blog posts!

Make sure to check out my other classmates, podcasts, and blogs as well

Coming up next is an exciting adventure that’s going to be full of study, and far a field! Our next project is coming up quick, and we’re gonna be flying to new destinations and discoveries.

Have a good day!

– Ailie 💜

“You taste like maple syrup! Oh, well would you like to taste it again?”

Hello people, and welcome to a very funny and freaky humanities blog post!

This humanities project was called “Swipe right for tragedy” and yes that is a tinder reference. Never did I think I’d hear a tinder reference in a project about a Shakespearean play! Have you guessed what Shakespeare play we focused on yet? If you said hamlet you are…. Wrong! This project was all about the tragedy that is, “Romeo and Juliet”!

We started off the project with compiling a craft doc, with notes and little at home assignments, to start getting to know the play better. It helped me really stay organized, and I could refer back to it easily.

R&J craft doc

 I liked reading the untranslated version of R&J, because the fancier more old timely language is so funny! Then after all of the individual little activities, and after we had a good understanding of the story, we started getting our roles for the play! I volunteered to be the costume designer, and I was assigned that role. I also said that I could play Juliet for half of the play, which was a challenge I was willing to take on. So I organized the  costumes, even making one of the, and I memorized my lines for Juliet for acts 4 and 5. 

The actual day of the play came so quickly, and I feel as though we would have benefited from a week or so of more time. But even with not much time to prepare, we still did pretty good! Everyone was invested in there roles, and performed well, even though there were a few missed cues, forgotten lines, and people reading off they’re iPad scripts. All of those could have definitely been fixed by a little bit more time. We worked great as a class and we were an amazing cast and crew!

Driving question: How do we use parody to bring the themes of Romeo & Juliet to a modern audience?

We brought Romeo & Juliet to a modern audience by updating the setting and language to make it relatable. The America vs Canada conflict is very real world, and relatable. We used humor and exaggeration to highlight key themes, and incorporated modern technology and culture to make the story more relevant. Our humor was very successful, such as our stereotype references. This approach made the classic tale engaging and more exciting for our viewers. And we hope everyone had as much fun watching it as we did performing it!

Competency: 😁 Communicating: I can communicate in appropriate and effective forms.

We all communicated pretty well! The main organizational people had a group chat. The group chat consisted of the DRI’s (directly responsible individuals) who were the lead writers of the scripts, me the costume designer, 2 technical people, and Caelum! Who was our amazing director of the entire production. Caelum team carried as the director, and made sure we were all very organized and on task. Everyone could have improved their communication on stage, and behind stage for the cues for the actual performance, but other than that it was very well executed.

So here you go! Here’s our production!

Romeo and Juliet | Our Parody!

Thank you so very much for reading! I hope I don’t get to tripped up in our next incredibly interactive, some would say world renowned plp project.

Have a nice day and a good spring break!

-Ailie 💜

Simon says… shadow a counselor for a day!

Hi! And welcome back to another careers post! 

“Hi I’m Ailie! For my PLP project, Mentor for a day, I went to Lynmore Elementary and experienced a day in the life of school councillor Lisa Jaakkola. To answer the question: How can learning from others’ career journeys help us shape our own?”

That was the intro to another PLP podcast, my audio reflection. So obviously for this assignment eyeshadow counsellor Lisa Jaakkola for a day. First off, just start off the day I went to Lynmore, and sat with Lisa in her office. She explained her job to me, and then I asked her a few few questions which were. When did you decide you wanted to be a councellor, and why? What do you like the most about your job, is there anything you don’t like, or could be improved? How does being a councellor translate to other aspects of your life? Did anyone inspire you along the way, did anyone’s actions particularly stand out to you? What education did you go through? What did you need, and where did you go?

She answered all of my interview questions, and then we interacted with the kids, which was by far my favourite part! We played pass with a big rubber ball, monster bingo, and Simon says! I also got to peek my head into the kindergarten, grade one, and grade 2 classes. Which are the ages that I’d most likely want to teach. I loved talking to and communicating with the kids, so that I could see how they wanted to be talked to and communicated with. It was such an amazing experience and I definitely want be able to be a supportive and open and empathetic teacher when I grow up.

Another assignment that helped me along this project was our career smart brevity note. We wrote a short note explaining the core things about the career path that we were interested in. I chose teacher and titled my smart brevity note “Teaching how to teach”.

Smart brevity note link: Smart brevity note

The driving question was: How can learning from others’ career journeys help us shape our own?

Learning from others’ career journeys offers inspiration, insights, and lessons. Lisa helped me envision possibilities, build confidence, and make informed decisions, that will ultimately bring me toward a fulfilling career path.

I’m looking forward to the future, but for now I will continue looking at corses that will point me in the right direction, like for example I’m hoping to do physiology! I will also utilize experiences like mentoring more often. For example my aunt is a speech language pathologist, and I’ve shadowed her before as well! I’m so excited now, to pursue education, and make a difference through something that I really am passionate about.

Without further a due here’s a link to my audio reflection! You should check out my classmates, audio reflections too because they were all compiled into a series on Spotify.

Thank you so much for reading another one of my butterfly banter, blog posts! I hope you have a great day, and a wonderful spring break! I’ll catch you on the trip (hint hint) side with our next magical interactive and far afield project.

-Ailie 💜

Hello and welcome back to another mPOL! It’s pretty much routine by now so let’s get into it!

Ms. Kadi! this is my mum Jen and my dad Paul.

Thank you so much for tuning into another mPOL!

Have a great day!

-Ailie 💜

Hello! This is my second ever careers blog post, and its a very informative one.

This project in careers, we learned about taxes, and other things to do with money, finances, and how we’re going to deal with our money when we’re older. It was a very real life project, and helped us learn very important information for our futures. 

The first thing we did, was start a stocks/investing game, called Investopedia. Our entire class was ranked on a leaderboard, depending on what we invested in and how our stocks were doing. It was a very informative game, and it taught me what percentage to buy, when to sell and other useful tips to do with investing. Unfortunately, most of my stocks lost value near the end, so I ended up being near the middle of the pack in the rankings. All in all, it was a very interesting experience and will help me with investing when I’m older.

The next portion of our project was a “buying a used car” simulation. We have to pretend that we were a university student buying a used car. But we also had other things we had to pay off like our rent, gas, pet insurance, etc. Unfortunately, we really needed that pet insurance because our cat whiskers swallowed some Lego, poor whiskers. We had to do a lot of calculations to determine if we were in debt or not. That part wasn’t my strong suit so I’m pretty sure I was in debt. The simulation was a very cool experience though, and I’ll make sure not to keep Lego around my future cat.

The final part of our project, and definitely my favourite part, was our student lead lessons. We got into groups of two, or individually presented on a topic to do with our project. My partner was Melissa, and we presented on buying a house: the basics. Our presentation was all about the basic needs of buying a house, and being a new house owner. We talked about house maintenance, credit score, and down payment, and a bunch of other topics to do with general housing. We really enjoyed presenting in this way, and educating our classmates. I also really enjoyed hearing the lessons from my classmates, and being taught by people who are more relatable, and actually my age. We also gave peer critique to another group, and that was quite useful to also reflect on our own work.

Our presentation:

Buying a house the basics

Driving question: How can I plan a financial future that will provide opportunities for success?

Using the information that I learned throughout this project, I can elaborate and continue expanding on it throughout my time at school, so that when I go off to university, I can be 100% ready for a stable financial future. I will set clear goals, tracking my spending, and creating a budget. I will have an extensive savings account, focus on paying off high-interest debt, and invest early to grow my wealth. Eventually I will look into a stable retirement plan. By regularly reviewing and adjusting my plan, I’ll stay on track to achieve my financial goals.

To very specifically answer the title of this blog post with the information I have learned during this project: 

To stay out of debt, spend less than you earn and make a simple budget to track your money. This is called dept to income balance, which is basically the fact that you have to make more than you spend. Save for emergencies so you don’t have to borrow. Focus on paying off high-interest debt first and only borrow what you can afford to pay back. Stay consistent with these habits to keep your finances on track.

Competency: 

😵‍💫 Processing: I can process ideas and further understandings: lifelong learning creates career and life opportunities.

Throughout this project, I processed different information, that would benefit me in the future. I did extensive research on the parts of this project that interest me, and processed this information so that I could eventually use it when I’m older. I will also be able to look back at this project, and process the information that I’ve learned, because it benefits me in the long run. This entire project was also a process, in which we had to be open to the idea of our finances in our future.

Thanks so much for learning with me! Now you know the basics of how to not be in debt!

Tune in next time when I basically become someone’s shadow for the day!

-Ailie 💜

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

Here’s yet another exhibition blog post! This exhibition was the winter exhibition 2024/25. The project we did for the exhibition was called Marketing Me! It was a careers project, and my favourite careers project so far! 

What’s the big idea?

“Career and life decisions reflect choices based on exploring, planning, reflecting, adapting, and deciding to find purpose and balance.”

To start of this project, we thought about our values. I decided that my top 3 values are Growth, Positivity and Connection. To shortly explain, Growth because not everyone is perfect and your allowed to improve. Positivity because if you have a positive mindset then you can achieve much more than if your unnecessarily negative and Connection because you connect with everyone you meet on some level and it’s important to keep the positive and most valuable connections. 

I then connected my values to butterfly attributes, because butterfly’s come to mind when I think of my values. For example butterflies go through metamorphosis, which are massive changes through out they’re lives that they have to grow through. Unfortunately I can’t be a butterfly when I grow up, so I also connected my values to possible career options. For example my positive attitude would make a open and supportive classroom for my future students if I became a teacher!

This year for the exhibition we were put into groups as categories, categorizing our possible careers. I was in the creative group, with my group members Alva, Nate, Isobel, Parker, Izzy and Julian. We had a corner of the library that we needed to decorate. We also came up with an interactive activity that we wrote on the whiteboard. The question we wrote was “what is your most important value? Draw it!” So I wrote Growth and drew a little flower! Each of us also contributed some food! I baked cupcakes, and we had quite a spread of cookies, candy canes and bubblegum as well. I loved engaging with people and talking to everyone who came up to my table. Here’s a picture of my setup!

The driving question for this project was: How might I present my passions, strengths, and learning to the world? 

To present my passions, strengths, and learning to the world, I can enhance my digital portfolio (my blog) which showcases my work and includes narratives about each project. I can align my passions with my professional goals, for example I can use my writing abilities to enhance my resume. I can (and did for this project) reflect on my core values, which are growth, positivity and connection, and I can seek feedback to identify my strengths, while actively pursuing my interests to demonstrate commitment. By combining these strategies, I can authentically and effectively communicate who I am, and what I bring to the table.

The circular competency was 🧐 Analyzing: I can analyze ideas and make supported conclusions. Making decisions about preferred career pathways:

I analyzed possible values of mine, and narrowed them all down from a list of 10 to my top 3. I had to really consider what was important to me and what values I utilized the most in my life. I also had to analyze my values and how they would align with my possible career opportunities. 

You might also see that I changed the title of my blog to more fit my goals and aesthetic. I want to metamorphoses like a butterfly, and grow and change through out my life to reach my goals and become a better version of myself!

Thank you so much for reading! Remember failure is just opportunity for growth!

-Ailie 💜

Hello!!

What the heck is a Zine?!

We’ll get to that later! I’m back again, but this time with a humanities blog post! 

The first thing we learned about in this project was Juno beach. What was Juno beach? And why is a Beach so important?!

 Juno Beach was a critical D-Day landing site where Canadian forces played a pivotal role in the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Approximately 14,000 Canadian soldiers stormed the 10-kilometer stretch of French coastline, facing intense German resistance. Despite heavy casualties, Canadian troops advanced further inland than any other Allied force that day, demonstrating remarkable courage and military skill. The successful mission became a defining moment of national pride, symbolizing Canada’s significant contribution to World War II and establishing the country’s reputation as a strong military power on the international stage.

Other than Juno beach, we also learned about the rest of WWII. But we focused on the things that brought out the most Canadian identity. 

Why did we focus on Juno beach in particular?

The final product of this project we learned, was going to be a zine that would be sent to the Juno Beach Museum in France and the Lynn Valley Legion. Also, to fundraise for the Juno Beach Foundation, we all were assigned to do one hour of service each, to raise 10 dollars per person. This was called our “Act of service” project. So for my act of service, Evelyn and I decided to do a forest clean up of Garibaldi forest, since we go on walks in the forest and we both noticed that there was a lot of trash. We ended up doing it when it was dark so we did a night clean up! In order to provide evidence for the act of service, and reflect on it, we wrote a short third person paragraph to display our act. Here’s my third person paragraph I wrote to display my act of service:

Third person service paragraph

As another part of our project we wrote an essay answering the driving question. Then after we had a properly MLA formatted essay, we had to convert it into zine format. So what is a zine? A zine (pronounced “zeen”) is a small, self-published magazine or booklet. It usually focuses on a specific topic and is created by individuals or small groups. Zines can cover many subjects, such as art, politics, personal stories, music, and more. Our class created a WWII themed zine answering the driving question, with the contents of the Zine being our essays but in Zine formatting. Here’s my Zine formatted essay:

Driving question: What role did the conflict of World War II play in shaping Canadian identity?

World War II was a transformative moment for Canadian national identity. By contributing significantly to the Allied victory, Canada emerged from the conflict with newfound international respect and a stronger sense of self. The war experience united Canadians across diverse backgrounds, showcasing their collective strength, courage, and commitment to global peace. It marked Canada’s transition from a small not as well known country, into an independent respected nation with a distinct cultural and political voice on the world stage.

Our competency for this project was: 😄 Communicating: I can communicate in appropriate and effective forms.

In order to properly format my essay, and make it the best I could, I had to go through multiple revision rounds. I had to communicate with Mrs. Mc and Ms Madsen to make sure I was doing my revisions properly. I also had to communicate with my classmates through peer critique, and specifically Evelyn, to line up our act of service. 

Thank you so much for reading my blog post!

Have a good day!

-Ailie 💜

Atomic definition: something that’s so small, it’s microscopic!

Hello and welcome to my first ever post for careers!!

For our first careers project we read the book” Atomic habits by James Clear”. Atomic Habits by James Clear teaches that small changes can lead to big results over time. It’s important to create systems that support your habits. Clear outlines four key steps to build good habits: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. He also emphasizes the importance of changing your identity, seeing yourself as the kind of person who has good habits. By focusing on tiny improvements every day, anyone can achieve lasting change in their life.

For this project our final assignment was to make anything to showcase what we learned form the book. The thing that I made for this project, was a scrapbook full of I am statements! Each I am statement represents a different part of my life, for example school, soccer etc. On each page I have my “I am” statement for example “I am a good student”. Then I have goals I’d like to meet to do with my statement. I also had some bad habits and how I should break them, because it’s important to recognize the good and the bad. I also have people who could help me with affirm my “I am” statements jotted down, because sometimes we need a little bit of help! My scrapbook:

7 images

We also created some really cool pop art, to represent our intentions for this year. I wrote an intention statement to go along with the art:

I want to be a dedicated student who fully comprehends the tasks and projects assigned to me. I will approach each assignment with curiosity and enthusiasm, ensuring that I get the objectives, success behaviours, criteria and requirements. When I don’t understand something, I will proactively seek clarification by asking questions. I will mainly ask my teachers questions, but sometimes my peers and if needed my parents. I also will embrace challenges as opportunities for growth, knowing that my inquiries contribute to deeper insights and better outcomes. I will work towards affirming the statement “I am a student who understands the work/task at hand and asks questions when she doesn’t.” I also want to be a person who is good at, and very proud of my main interests. So, I can also turn that statement into “I am a person who understands the music I play/ my sport (soccer) and asks questions and tries to improve when she doesn’t. In soccer I’ll ask my coach and in band I’ll ask my band teacher.

My pop art:

🤔 Questioning: I can ask questions, research information, and share ideas.

For this project our competency was Questioning. I asked myself questions about how I could connect atomic habits to my every day life. I did research through through out the project, through reading the book. I also referred back to the book when making my scrapbook. I shared ideas with my classmates during the process of making my scrapbook. I also shared my thoughts about the book each time we met to discuss it.

The driving question for this project was: “How can small changes in my habits shape my success this year, and beyond?”

Small changes in your habits can greatly affect your success. For example, spending just 10 minutes a day reading or exercising can lead to big improvements over time. These little actions add up and help you become more productive. Sticking to these habits also builds discipline, making it easier to reach bigger goals. In the end, these small changes can help you succeed now and in the future.

Thank you so much for reading my first careers blog post! Stay tuned for our next project, which is a reoccurring favourite, that happens every winter….

-Ailie 💜