Month: October 2021

Congratulations You Just Killed a Turtle

Hello to whomever is reading this 👋🏼. Tis I, Brooke. And I’m back with my second blog post for this new school year. 

People and the environment. Let’s talk about it. The driving question for this project was “How do people and the environment affect each other?” And the short answer is rather simple. Both people and the environment hold a lot of power over one another.

The product of this project is a physical letter sent to someone who can create change on a specific environmental issue. I wrote my letter about plastic bag pollution to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the Honourable George Heyman. But in order to have a letter that is worthy of being sent to such an important person, we had to do a lot of writing practice.

The letter

The topic of our letter is an environmental issue of our choice in British Columbia. I chose to research and write about plastic pollution in BC, specifically plastic bags. I researched a lot about what BC is already doing about reducing single use plastic and I came across CleanBC’s Plastics Action Plan. I think that reducing single use plastic waste is super important and that is why I chose to bring this issue up with Minister George Heyman.

  • First letter draft

I only put two drafts into the slideshow because most of my drafts were just adding small details or re-wording a sentence or two. Overall I think that I could’ve done a more sophisticated job at executing the final letter but I am still proud of what I put into the mailbox.

CommonLit

A very important part of this project was CommonLit.org. We read 5 texts from CommonLit that all had something to do with the environment. We also did 2 writing lesson assignments that went along with 2 of those texts. The lessons taught us about writing explanations and using evidence with context. There were also 2 vocabulary quizzes that took place on CommonLit to help us use better vocabulary choices when writing about climate change. Overall even though I found the CommonLit assignments annoying at times, I can definitely say that they have helped me improve the way I write.

About two weeks into this project we read a CommonLit poem called “Song For The Turtles”. We were then asked to go outside and write our own poem about our environment. Lots of people wrote their poems about the destruction of the environment but I chose to write mine about what I observed while sitting among the sunflowers in the school garden. Here is my poem;

Sitting Among The Sunflowers 

Sitting among the sunflowers
Their tall stalks jutting up from the earth beneath
Reaching towards the sun with their flowers of gold

Bees swiftly fly to and fro
Working hard for their hive
Ants climbing up the stalks
On a mission they have yet to complete

A soft breeze arrives and the garden comes alive
The leaves shiver and sway
But the strength of the stalks never stray
Sitting among the sunflowers

Ok so admit I’m no Edgar Allan Poe, but I think that writing the poems was a great  exercise in observing our environment.

CommonLit Connections

The CommonLit connections was one of the final activities in this project. We learned about identifying the theme of a text, and then had to identify the theme of our letter and the theme of one of the CommonLit texts that we read. We then wrote a multi-paragraph response connecting our letter with one of the texts, I chose to use a story called “He-y Come on Ou-t”. The common theme that I came up with for the two texts was “Simple actions can have devastating consequences on the environment.”

My CommonLit connection

What have I learned?

I can say with confidence that my writing improved greatly throughout this project. I have come to be more aware of the devastating damage that climate change is doing to our planet. I hope that my letter can help create change in BC with the help of our government.

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

IT’S THE EXPONENT APOCALYPSE

HellooOOooOooOOOOoooOOO and welcome back to another year of PLP blog posts. As you may have guessed, we just finished our first project in Scimatics 9. I found this project to be similar to the game about tectonic plates that we did in grade 8. The end result of this project was to be fun game that used exponent laws. And without further ado, I shall take you through the ins and outs of the creation of my partner and I’s game, the EXPONENT APOCALYPSE.

Starting off

As per any usual scimatics project, this project started with a project start mind map. The project start mind maps are a way to gather all of your knowledge and questions before starting the new project. I tried to write down all of the ways that math is included in games and what I already knew about exponents.

The project

We launched this project with a practise in creating game rules. As a group we were asked to create games that used a certain number of dice and involved addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in the rules. It was basically a toned down version of the final game that we would be making.

A huge part of this project was incorporating exponent laws into our games. And in order for that to happen we had to first learn about what exponents were and what laws they followed. We did a multitude of Kahoot! quizzes and workbook pages to really start to understand how exponents function.

Throughout the whole project we were thinking about what we wanted our game to be. The rules, the points system, the objectives, even the game pieces. We made many drafts and had our friends test out our game constantly to see if there were any gameplay issues. Weeks later and we had our final game ready for game day. We call it “Exponent Apocalypse”, a mashup between Zombies and math. The goal is to get to the “Lab” at them end of the game board before the other player. You move up spaces by correctly answering the prompts on the cards flipped in front of you. Here, it makes more sense if you read the game rules; Exponent Apocalypse

Core Competencies 

Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games

The points system in our game is quite simple, answer a question correctly and you get to move up one space. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t make it super hard or complicated to win because it’s more fun when you’re not confused half the time.

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms

This competency mainly focuses on the game rules themselves, if they are clear, complete, interesting, and personalized. Having an obvious theme to the game helped make the game more interesting to play because it gave it a bit of personality. We were going to add in a 5th exponent law to the game but we thought that that may get to complicated for people to remember while playing. Looking back we probably could’ve added another law without jeopardizing the simplicity of the game.

Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches

This year I am trying to stay more on track in class. I found that having a good partner like Faith really helped me to use my class time efficiently. Faith and I made an excellent team because our different skills worked alongside each other very smoothly.

Thank god this post is almost done

Well overall I’d say that this project was a success. I learned a lot about exponents and continued to learn about what makes a great game. Hopefully the rest of the projects this year go as smoothly as this one did.

Thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke.