So far, this year, it has been pretty great. PLP has really influenced my worldview. I now have many skills that I have learned to develop thanks to this program. Quote from Ally: “Only in PLP ladies and gentlemen”. PLP is a sort of program that we learn inside and outside of the classroom, for example, we have gone on some pretty amazing field trips to enhance our learning in ways I’ve never thought of before.  Here is a link to my reflection on our Oregon field school.

So, you may be asking, what is an mPOL? Well, an mPOL is a mid-year presentation of learning. Yes, that may be a little too fancy for you, so let me do one better. Have you ever heard of a student led conference? Well, in case you haven’t, it says it in the name, it’s basically like a parent-teacher conference except that it’s the student that does most of the talking..and that’s in charge of it. It’s between you, your teachers and your parents. The student is the one that presents what they have learned. Wait, no, no, in my case, you present the best examples of the opportunities you had to progress as a learner.

I really enjoy the difference of how we learn here in PLP, it may require more homework and hard work (haha, you see what I did there), which makes it more of a challenge. Lucky for me, I enjoy a good challenge. 

So let’s just get on into it. First, I will start with Humanities (English Language arts + Social studies), it was pretty hard to choose one thing that we did since I think that all of them were a pretty big challenge for me, but, I decided to choose the advertising unit. You can see my blog posts about advertising here and here. 

I think that visiting Pound & Grain was pretty inspiring but on the other hand, you would think that that would be enough motivation. I feel that I could’ve pushed my creativity farther with the look of the ads that I made (especially the first one, the deep cove ad). If I were to redo it again, the look of it would be way more eye appealing. This showed that I need to feel more motivated/inspired  when coming up with those sort of ideas. So, looking at tons professional ads made from big companies and finding out what technique and appeals I could use in my ads. Ever since this project, I have had my eye on it for some possibilities of what to do in the future, although, I may want to stay with my life long dream of becoming a veterinarian. In conclusion of this subject, I have learned that advertising requires imagination and creativity in order to make successful ads. 

Now for science, to end our unit about tectonic plates, we were each assigned to make a children’s book that would educate kids about tectonic plates and other things related to the subject such as volcanoes and earthquakes. I kind of left mine to the last minute, which was obviously not a good thing to do. At the end, it wasn’t all that bad. The storyline was represented pretty well but, I feel like I could have made my information on the plates a little more clear or in smaller sentences, especially for the purpose of our audience that the book is supposed to be written for. That taught me a lesson to never leave things to the last minute again because, I will definitely regret it and it won’t turn out as awesome as I’d like it to be. 

 

Let’s move on to math, something that I don’t really enjoy doing in this wonderful subject is, fractions. For one of our units, we did operations on fractions. Because of me disliking this certain unit, it took me longer to do the assignments/hand ins because I would rather talk to my friends or just do something else that would lead me to procrastinate. One thing that I am going to work on is that even if I don’t like something, I need to finish all of it first, then I could do other homework that I have, because that’s what the class is for. I need to work the same way I do in all my other classes. Because, homework that is not done at school is done at home and I do not have that much time after school because of all my activities. 

Now let’s talk about Maker. The thing that I enjoyed most doing was my blog. Since I am half French and went to a French school, I think that there is a drastic difference between my writing at the beginning of the year and now. At the beginning of the year, one of my goals was to start writing more in order to get better at it. So, my idea was to start a journal, at the start, I didn’t write in it much because I always forgot. Now, a sneak peak to the next subject, I time-blocked when I was going to do this every night or so. In my blog, we also did a student blogging challenge. Where, every week we have a certain subject and certain tasks to complete. Which means that the quote “Practice and practice then, you’ll get there” or something along those lines is indeed true. Because, I tried pretty hard to get my writing from horrible and not understandable to decent and more understandable which is a pretty big difference if you ask me.

For the last thing that I am going to talk about today is PGP. PGP stands for “Personal Growth Plan” basically, it helps you become a better student. In PGP, we learned how to do things like time blocking and goal tracking. We have been given a book to read that helps you with those things called “What do you Really want”, including a journal which would mean that we would have to write on paper… DUH..DUH..DUUUUHHH! I have decided that I am going to time block at least once a week to plan out the following week, maybe month (if I have time). The one big bad work habit that I have is procrastinating. For example, when I’m at home doing homework, I get a notification, then I check it thinking “only for a few minutes” or “just this one notification”… but 30 minutes or so later… I’m still on it. I have been trying to work with that, turning off my notifications, deleting my social media’s, etc. 

To conclude, in this past couple months, I have learned so much, from the field schools to just in the classroom in general. Just like I said at the beginning, this year has been great and I think that I have really improved over the past couple months, the difference is crazy. I have one last question to end it all today since I’d like to improve as a learner, how can I limit myself from distractions as well as procrastinating less in order to work more productively and ethically in and outside of the classroom?