Social Studies/English – Inside Angela Chirico

Twitter POLs

Angela on June 21, 2017June 21, 2017

Welcome back to my humble, humble blog. Today is a very special day, it’s the day where I have my Transitional Presentation of Learning. This is a semi-annual meeting for the student, teacher, and the parents to reflect on the year. These happen twice during the span of the school year and you can check out last summer’s post where I reflected the the work I was proud of and what I could improve on. There’s been a little change to our conferences and this time they’re called, “TPOLs” This stands for Transitional Presentation of Learning and are to address the question, “Why do you feel ready to advance to the next grade level?” Using examples from our blog, we are to reflect on our growth as a learner, our work habits, work ethic, areas for improvement, teamwork, responsibility, and production of high quality work as a PLP learner. We are also reflecting on our goals we set at the beginning of the year and seeing how we’ve progressed and completed those goals. Instead of reading off a blog or script, we are to tell a story about our learning and experiences this year.

To start this off, I’m going to reflect on my growth as a learner. Some things I’ve improved on would be my time management and organization. I’m able to predict how long something will take me and I’m able to break the work down into parts so that I can complete sections of the project little by little and I won’t feel overwhelmed. I’ve become a lot more skilled with the iPad and its applications. I’m able research things faster and I can use apps like Explain Everything, Keynote, or Paper by 53 to express my ideas. My ability to problem solve has grown a lot this year, with making prototypes for our Blue Sky project to our Metaphor Machines.

Lucas measuring wood for our Metaphor machine

I’ve learned the consequences of procrastination, such as staying up late, getting sick, missing out on events, or falling behind in school. Once I begin a project, I work very hard on it but I will sometimes put off initiating it. I would be delayed after school by eating and slacking however I’ve improved much on that. Knowing which project to work on first and prioritizing is something I have some room to improve on. Knowing how much sleep I need and how much I need to eat to have enough energy for the day is also something I could improve on. Working in a neat invironment is something I’ve learned to be key to having a quality project with little stress. I’ve learned to ask for help and when to ask. I need to continue on not procrastinating but planning and utilizing a calendar to my advantage. Becoming a leader is something I’d like to do to make it easier to bring my ideas across. You can look at how I plan to do this by reading my gifted writing blog post.

An example for revision would be my Cell City project. This was a science project we did where we needed to match organelles inside a cell to city parts and make a poster of the city. If I’m being honest, my first draft wasn’t all that pretty. So I took it home and spent way too many hours on it, paying a lot of attention to details instead of the overall picture.

In a project awhile back called the Metaphor Machine I was shunned out and wasn’t allowed to do much. I changed the situation by instead of asking, “Can I work on this?” To, “I’m going to work on this.” This helped me to be assertive in group projects so that I can take part in what I’m skilled with. Another example of teamwork is that I always try to help others whether it be stacking chairs after school, picking up garbage, or cleaning up after the Blue Sky exhibition instead of being in the gym.

I’m proud of lots of work I’ve done but some of the greatest would include my writing that was part of the Frankenstuffie project. These were journal entries that my frankenstuffie was sending to his long lost friend. Another piece of work I’m proud of would be my Jean Talon video which I spent a lot of time animating and it was worth it.
I think that moving up into grade 10 will be different however I think I can tackle the challenge. I’ve learned so many great skills from PLP that will help me in the future and my learning process. To have had the field trips made the concepts we were learning real and gave us a unique experience. Having the hands on learning gave me a better understanding and made me more passionate about the topic we were covering. I’m so fortunate to have been able to work in PLP and learn from the great teachers and students.

To conclude, this Twitter POL has helped me to know what my strengths are and what I could improve on. I can’t wait to see where grade 10 will take me!

Gifted

Angela on June 4, 2017

What does it mean to be “Gifted”? To have such raw talent that others watching would stare speechless, in awe of your brilliance. This is what we’re studying in health & career and it’s very thought-provoking. We read the piece of writing above and were told to write a 100-150 word “plan of action” to become gifted at whatever we pleased. Here’s my paragraph:

The word count may be a little over the limit, but I’ve just got a lot to say. This piece of writing can from my heart and presenting in front of others while having confidence is something I’ve desired for longer than I can remember. I’m working towards this goal and I hope I can become more accustomed to sharing my opinions and thoughts in front of other people.
Toodles!

Morris the Moose Goes to School

Angela on May 30, 2017June 4, 2017

Hello, welcome to my blog! Today I’ll be sharing with you a long lost tale about a Frankenstuffie. This little guy was a creation part of the “Who’s in Control: People or the Environment?” unit we’ve done in PLP. We’ve worked on this unit for a huge chunk of the year and we’ve been very busy bees. To start it off, we read Andy Weir’s ‘The Martian’ and filled out sheets that asked questions like, “Who is in control in this section of the novel: the humans or the environment? Justify your answer with at least two examples from the book.” We would read a handful of chapters every week and fill out these sheets as a reflection to the section we read. Here’s an example of one of the sheets we filled out.

This reflects on the very last few chapters in the book (Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!) where Mark makes his way to return to his team on the Ares 2 mission. He gets there safely and everyone is happy. But as you can see on the sheets, there are still a few unanswered questions that are driving me crazy. This book had an interesting style because it would include different perspectives from different characters/groups of people. We were introduced to that style of writing so that incase we wanted to include something like it in our epistolary story, we’d have the option.

To give you a better understanding of the epistolary stories, it was basically entries we wrote about the whole story arc of our creature and its adaptation to this new change to its physiographic region. Meaning, the environment changed and so the animal had to change in order to adapt to it. We were first given a place with a certain climate around Canada and my group was assigned the Prairies. I chose to do the SouthEast Prairies and brainstormed what I could put into my story. Here’s a picture of the storyboard I came up with:

After making the storyboard for the epistolary story, it was time to get writing! We did drafts of our epistolary stories and after finishing them had our peers critique them, giving us feedback.

For my epistolary story, I wrote it in a way that Morris the Moose would be writing letters to a friend who’d gone traveling. I went for an older style of writing and was inspired by the language and expressions included in the letters sent in the time period during WW2. I got my inspiration from the letters on this website and found it to be quite easy to adapt to that writing style. Here’s my final epistolary story:

If you read my epistolary story that i’m so proud of, you’ll notice the antagonist. This was a monster we made as a part of a math project and it was really fun to put together.

The final part of this project was the video. Our videos were based off of our epistolary story but we were allowed to change a few things. Here’s a picture of the storyboard for my video:

In the end, I didn’t include the antagonist because I just thought it would be a simpler and easier to comprehend if there weren’t any complications with the characters. In its place, I took the environment struggles to a new level and they went on for a long time. Here’s my video:

https://youtu.be/1FRejfJZvdg

The Great Intendant

Angela on May 28, 2017June 2, 2017

Hola, soy Angela. Today’s magnificent post will be all about a man named Jean Talon who was the Great Intendant of New France. He lived from 1626 until 1694 and did lots of memorable things for New France. I’ll give you a short background of what he did.

Jean Talon, statue in front of the Quebec Parliament Building

Jean Talon had a revolutionary role in the development of New France. Talon aspired to change the economic base of the colony from fur-trading to agriculture, but it couldn’t be done unless the population grew. And so, Talon had organized a plan for settlers to come to New France and called them Les Filles du Roi (The king’s daughters). The plan he had was for these women to marry and have children which he provided financial support for. He paid grants consecutively every year to couples with large families and over one thousand women came to New France within the time that he was Intendant.

Once the population grew, Talon proceeded to begin his goal to diversify the economy in France. He introduced a shoe factory, a shipyard and lumber industry. He popularized the mining of copper and iron which helped the colony greatly. He encouraged farming in which he brought in pigs, cattle, horses, and got colonists to harvest wheat and other products suchlike.

He managed to get the citizens of New France to respect him by having them be a part of what decisions he made. He visited the people’s households and discussed their needs and problems at that time. He did this from 1665 until 1672 when he was recalled to France by the King. Because he made all these vast improvements to New France, he was known as the Great Intendant.

Here’s a video I made that captures nearly all this information in under two minutes:

Cites I used:

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jean-talon/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Talon

I’ve reached my Imagination Destination

Angela on April 18, 2017April 20, 2017

Yes, it happened! Destination Imagination provincials have come and gone and I’m now left with armfuls of certificates and ribbons!

Incase you are completely lost and have not a clue of what I’m speaking of you may head over to my enlightening blog post where I explain the regional tournament and how we got there. If you really don’t want to read my first post, heres a brief summary of Destination Imagination (or DI for short):

DI is essentially a set of tournaments that teams from elementary schools, high schools, and universities of a region go to compete in their chosen challenge. The teams compete against each other within their age category and the type of the team’s challenge. Every team will have chosen one main challenge, and will be given one “instant challenge” while the team is at the tournament. Depending on the main challenge that the team has chosen, it takes a lot of preparation before the team is able to present it infront of a panel of judges. The instant challenge is somewhat self-explanatory, where the team is given a challenge that’s either performance based, task based, or a blend of both. The team will have a set time to do the task and there will be appraisers judging how the team works together to accomplish the challenge. Of course, with a maximum of 100 points to earn, there are many other factors that the team will be scored on, for example the execution of the challenge, creativity of material use or the creativity of the performance, teamwork and maybe something specific for the certain challenge.

My group had the pleasure of tackling the 3-peat Improve challenge. Now, I’m certainly uncertain that I know what you’re thinking. ‘Angela, you can do improv? No way! I thought you needed to be entertaining and funny to do that!’

Uhhhh…yeah…that’s often a requirement. But you see, I want to take risks! To get the most out of this wondrous, opportunity-filled life! I want to make every second of everyday of every week of every month of every year of every decade, worth while. And so, I put on my big-boy underwear and decided. ‘Maybe, just maybe, I could take a leap of faith,’ Often times, I do “shoot for the stars” but, I’m usually too busy gazing at the moon and end up crashing into a meteorite or something.

So, on the day that my teacher separated us into our DI groups, (mine, consisting of beloved Kate, Willa, Robberto, and Claire) we got our map to the destination of imagination together…more or less. We brought in our 13″ x 13″ x 13″ box of goodies to class like good students and began to ever so slowly bring in props to fill this magic box. But we had even more planning to do! We had to plan out our two Team Choice Elements. Now, I was very thankful and appreciative that we only had to do two team choice elements because I, for one, lack what some may call “skill” which may have been a problem due to the team choice elements being a reflection on something that the team’s “passionate” for. Passion, meaning being good at something or having enough passion to be good at something, and being able to demonstrate it at the DI provincial tournament. But, not all was lost! The amazing grade nine improve group put our almighty heads together and thought up some extraordinary ideas! Because of the group’s passion for music, we had Kate teach Robbie how to play the flute, and we included it in our majestic box o’ stuff. And later, yours truly hand crafted a clay jem which was also included in the magic box. But, not for long my friend. This jem betrayed me and decided to become an almost liquid blob which I was forced to quarantine by putting it into a container and eventually throwing it away forever.

But, do not lose hope just yet! Our dearest Claire managed to keep the ingenious clay idea alive by making new clay and not dumping buckets of water in the formula. So it’s settled then! All that the team will need to do is practice improv skits and games daily with provincials in mind.

DI provincials crept up on us as a predator would do its prey. When the time came to preform our three skits, our team was pretty OK I think. Looking back at the performance, our team definitely performed our best on our first skit, the prompt being that the stock character is working in a car dealership and the stock character was a royal person, our genre was parody. Our group is very experienced in the whole Kim K field and so we had our royal person be the one and only, Kimberly Noel Kardashian.

All in all, I had a lot more fun doing improv than I did doing fine arts last year. Learning how to improvise and becoming just a tad more experienced made all the difference. In a simple form, t’was pretty good. Stay tuned for further blogposts, where you will hear all about a small moose’s story in a big world.

Given these points, it’s very clear that we all have one question that needs to be answered: Why does a round pizza come in a square box?

Here’s My Canada: A Story

Angela on March 27, 2017May 30, 2017

Hello and welcome back to my blog. In grade 9 flight we’ve been learn a lot about making videos, such as making a storyboard, plot graph, script, and much more. Our most recent assignment was to create a video explaining what Canada is to us. Click here to visit their official site. The video could be about almost anything, ranging from values, sports, nature, culture, diversity, or history, we could base it off just about anything. In class and in previous assignments, we’ve done a lot of work with plots in stories and our teachers suggested that we could use that to our advantage and base our videos around a story or an experience of ours. At the beginning, I was clueless as to what I could do for my video and was a little worried because the project description was so vague. Luckily, we were able to do some note taking in class about Canada and that gave me a better understanding of what I could include in my video. Here’s a picture of the notes I took:

I watched a lot of the videos that were uploaded in their app which set the bar that I was to not only surpass, but exceed. Our teacher supplied us with the rubric that would be used to judge all the Canada video submissions. Our teachers had us make a few drafts of the video and we were out in pairs to give feedback on the first draft of each other’s videos. Click here to watch my first draft. Here’s a picture of my feedback from Robbie:

Rubric — Other feedback from Robbie: ” I enjoyed the effects including the lightning and the translation between the kayak flip and the waves however the narrator needs to sound more confident.”

As I said before, it was very hard for me to find a story to use in my video. I knew what I’d wanted the story to be based around, I wanted an experience of when a stranger helped another out of pure kindness. Unfortunately, my mind would completely blank when I’d tried to find examples of when this happened to me. I could’ve came up with a story but my imagination is very limited and I really didn’t want to. I proceeded to go around the classroom asking people if them or someone they know ever had an experience where a stranger went out of their way to help them. I’d asked nearly the entire class until Adam told me about how his older brother helped a woman during his paddle board race. The women from the organization seemed to enjoy the story, (at least I hope they did) however because my memory is (most likely) worse than a goldfish’s, I had to read it off my cracked iPad.
I showed the first draft of my video to a few other people, including my classmate and friend named Willa. She enjoyed the video and suggested to add some background music so that the ending of my video would be smoother. For the second draft, I added some background music I got off youtube so that the video could seem more professional. As for the voice over, I redid it many times because my throat was acting up and in most clips it were as if a twelve year old boy that was going through puberty had been narrating my video. It took a lot of editing and research to get the audio just right and the timing perfect for all the clips and effects included. At last, you may watch my glorious, inspirational, and meaningful video.

In summary, I had lots of fun making this short video because I was able to bring in all my ideas and be creative with what to include to represent the story. I liked adding cool effects, such as the lightning sound effect at the beginning and the clip of the kayak flipping over. I’m very happy with how this mini-project turned out and I hope to do more like this in the future. Until the next post, goodbye!

Your Destination is Your Imagination

Angela on March 6, 2017March 6, 2017

Welcome to my humble abode. Today we’re catching up on the greatness that is Destination Imagination. You can read more about it here. To sum it up in a simple form, it is essentially a tournament where kids form teams and compete against each other in their age groups and challenges. The teams can have a maximum of seven people on them and each team must present their own understanding of the challenge by using a story. The challenges each have a specific task that the team must complete. I was on the improv team and you can watch video about what we had to do here. Every group must also compete in an instant challenge which is basically a challenge with a certain time limit. The teams were scored based on teamwork, creativity, and how well they did the challenge. Our class practiced a lot of instant challenges and my group had a common Kim Kardashian theme.

Each group is required to have two team choice elements. The team choice elements are meant to shine in your performance and must represent a group’s interest. My group (named Easy 20/20) had Robbie learn how to play the flute in order to represent our passion for music. Our other team choice element didn’t really shine through but I attempted to make the hope diamond out of clay which I’d also made but it ended up being a blue blob in a container.

Each team competes at regionals and if they qualify will then move on to provincials, which is the qualifying competition for globales. This year, regionals took place at St George’s and at first it was challenging to navigate around the school but it got better as the day went on. At regionals, all the teams needed to be there for 8am and at 8:30 all the groups presented in the gym with their posters. At 9:30 my group watched the grade 8’s present and other than being short on time, did really well. Our instant challenge was at 10:45 and I think we did really well but we could’ve improved on our teamwork. Then at 1:00pm came our challenge, which was very interesting. As you know, we must present 3 skits with the same plot but the stock character and genre changes each time. Our first skit didn’t go too well, to say the least. It was probably the most agonizing three minutes of our lives. The second skit wasn’t bad but there was some room for improvement. Then, we have the third skit. This was the legendary skit that saved our group from last place even though we were the only group competing in our age group. Something we could’ve done differently would definetly be practicing in front of an audience just before the competition to get into the rythme of improv. I think that it went really well in general and you can watch the video of our presentation here. We have provincials in about a month which will be held in Surrey. See you then!

New Year New Me

Angela on January 6, 2017February 17, 2017

Welcome to my very first blog post of 2017! I sometimes look back at my older posts and just cringe. A lot. I think that says quite a bit about how I learned about how blog posts can be different from a regular write up that you make for your teacher. I’ve learned to add links to certain things which make writing these so much easier because I don’t have to do a lot of explaining. I’ve learned how to add gifs which add humour and they make my blog posts more enjoyable for people to read. These posts have also gotten more entertaining to write just because I can make these and have my writing reflect my personality by using humour, sarcasm and many puns.

A little while ago in the flight 9 class, we did a project called “The Harry Potter Project” This was another Blue Sky project where we had to come up with an inquiry question related to Harry Potter that we could answer with our project. Myquestion was, *drumroll* “How can I recreate the Marauder’s Map to work at Seycove?” This question was inspired by an 11th grader named Chloe on a presentation night when I realized that the two previous questions I came up with sucked. After I had seen that my question had been approved, I began to worry a little bit about what I was going to do to answer this question. I don’t know a thing about coding and I’m just bad in general with technology. So, I spoke to ms Willemse and found out that in order for this project to work, I’d need to use beacons and place them around the school in the chosen areas and they’d send an alert to people’s iPhone as long as they’d already installed the app called “Locly“. Within this app, I made a Treasure Hunt. I first had a google docs document where I put in all the places that I thought had a deep meaning or that was a big part of Seycove. I researched and took pictures of these places that I would later insert into my treasure hunt. I made an account within the locly website and I got to know it a little by exploring the site. I then came across some really helpful tutorial videos for the locly app. These taught me how to put together the treasure hunt and how to bring in other apps. At times this could be very frustrating because I would want to make something one way but the app wouldn’t let me or nothing was explained about it in the tutorial videos. Other than that, this project was pretty fun to make and I loved making the clues for the treasure hunt. You won’t guess what I brought in for the treasure, peppermint candy canes! They were so cute and small and I was obsessed with them! Unfortunately, there wasn’t any treasure hunt because I couldn’t get my peppermint hands on the beacons but not to worry! I served them as our group’s food at the exhibition night and it went really well.
Now, for what you’ve all been waiting for, the clues! My first clue had been placed in ________ and I put it there because sports are a huge part of seycove. The second clue was an animated scratch kinda thing, like where you buy a 1 million dollar lottery ticket and you scratch to reveal whether you’ve lost or you’ve lost. This clue reveals a clue leading to the ___ room because so much incredible learning happens in that very room. The next clue was a trivia! The answer to this quiz was _____, because that’s what I brought in! And finally, you are told to head to a big pile of _____.
As I explained before, I brought in a few more apps outside of Locly. The one I probably spent the most time and effort on was Paper by 53. This app allows you to draw just about anything and it’s very easy to use once you get the hang of it. I used this app to draw a clue for the treasure hunt and to draw the “I solemnly swear that I am up to no good” art and I used it to draw “Mischief managed” art. All of these took quite a bit of time to do. Now, I’m not the best at art and Ms Willemse and Mr Hughes could tell you that so when I found out that I had to do shading, I froze in fear and despair. It didn’t end up being too bad though, right? I think I deserve an A for effort in that piece because out of almost everything, I think that the shading was probably the most difficult part of this project. It took a lot of valuable time and had me fuming the whole way through. I guess that in the end my hard work shows but the thing is, it doesn’t. Because long ago, in a land far, far away, my dad jammed the printer. And so now, my project pays the price.
Another app I used as part of the treasure hunt is Bookry. This app allows me to make fun interactive clues to put in my treasure hunt. It allowed me to bring in photos and use them for the clues with some animation added on to the discovery of the clue. Once again, there was no coding that was required to make any of these animations.
In summary, this project had its ups and downs but it was all around a fun project to make. I loved how my poster board turned out and I loved how the clues worked. At the beginning, I was worried that the project wouldn’t work out but I was happy in the end when it all came together.
Here’s a picture of my poster board:

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