Hello and welcome to the last blog post of the year. This post will cover my BC First Peoples 12 course and the 2024 Spring Exhibition.
Overall I did feel like most of what we learned in BCFP was a recap for me. I tried to find new take-aways and knowledge where I could, so I do feel like I now have a very solid understanding of many aspects of BCFP education. I was interested in the concept of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and the role of plants in First Nations society. Then, I bridged it to my humanities upstander project where I was focusing on my mom as an upstander for health, wellness, and women’s equality. I was a little disappointed that we had to combine BCFP with Humanities for our exhibition because I feel like it diluted the messages of each aspect because there was more than one topic.
The Spring Exhibition was a great opportunity for me to showcase what I had learned in BCFP and to honor my mom at the same time. I always enjoy being able to talk about my work at exhibitions, and this time it was amazing to be bragging about my mum because I am so proud of her! It gave my whole project and presentation a different feel with the purpose of honouring my mum in mind. I felt a sense of pride sharing with others the knowledge I had gained and theconnections I had made throughout the course. It was also amazing to see the work of the other BCFP blocks and my classmates and how they had interpreted the prompt in their own ways.
I believe that the combination of BCFP and Humanities for the exhibition actually turned out to be a positive thing in the end. It allowed us to explore the connections between the two subjects and to see how they can compliment each other. It was a great learning experience for me and I am grateful for the opportunity to be a part of it.
As the year comes to a close, I am thankful for all that I have learned and experienced in my BC First Peoples 12 course. I look forward to continuing my journey of learning and growth in the future. Thank you for following along with me on this blog and I wish you all the best in the upcoming year.
Am I financially literate? Are you? Well this project was all about finance.
Finance
We did this activity about budgeting and how budgets cam be helpful. Our objective was to develop a monthly budget, differentiating between fixed and variable expenses. This exercise proved to be an effective method for acquiring budgeting and money management skills.
Moving on, we embarked on the activity centred around planning for our future careers. We engaged in thorough research on summer jobs (if we were interested in getting them) and set goals for the amount of money we wanted to save by the end of summer. Additionally, we explored the average costs associated with attending university and living costs. This experience provided us with a good understanding of our financial prospects for the upcoming future.
Stock Market Simulation
The highlight of this project was definitely the “Stock Market Challenge.” It was a competition within our class to see who could make the most money in a simulated stock market. We had two options: go for big, well earning stocks or focus on ethical investments. I decided to go ethical and really look into each of the companies I invested in. I am proud of my choices because I know that these companies have an overall positive impact on the world. You can see my reflections for all 5 weeks of this challenge here
This is what my stocks looked like at the end of the challenge ⬇️
Conclusion
So overall after this project I feel better equipped to handle my finances in the future. I am more confident that I will be knowledgeable in how to manage my money and not go broke.
Hello party people and welcome back to my Learning Portfolio, or simply, my blog. The year is almost at an end and that means that a lot of these posts are going to be coming out at once so don’t forget to check out my other posts as well! So here is the summative post for my last grade 9 maker project, “Your First Film”
ProjectOverview
You may remember that I recently did another project with videos called “VIBRANT VIDEO POST”, and I would say that this project was basically the final product of that project. This project was all about using all of the video skills that we’ve gained top make one final video, a documentary with a topic of our choosing. The documentary had to include an interview, storyline, message, and original music. At first I had no clue what I wanted to do my documentary on, and after a few ideas I landed on a general topic of “gardening”. You see, a few days ago I moved into an apartment and I really want to grow a little garden on our balcony. Originally, I was going to focus the doc on my journey of planting a potato, but as I got to filming I realized that my original idea may have been too “vlog like” and that I could use the influence of my interviews to guide the story instead. This project was also going to be the grade 9’s focus for showcasing at the spring exhibition. Now unfortunately I was sick so I wasn’t able to be at the exhibition this year, but I’ll talk more about that later.
Driving question
How can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and storytelling skills?
By using all of the skills that I have learned about making videos, I can create something that is of good quality and interesting to the viewers. A well written logline and treatment indices the viewer and can help get your video to the right audience. Hopefully as I explain a bit of the project, you will be able to see how I was able to use my video and storytelling skills to engage and entertain my audience.
The Documentary
As I mentioned briefly in the driving question, we created loglines and treatments for our documentaries. A treatment is a short summary of your documentary, and a logline is a few sentences that you would put in the description or be the tagline of a movie trailer. This helped us start to envision a storyline to create a structure for our documentary. Then we created a screenplay. A screenplay is a written view of what you will see and hear in the film, who will be in each scene, where things take place, etc. My documentary ended up being quite different from my original screenplay, you will probably be able to tell later on when you finally get to see my doc.
Next, step we created the storyboard. A storyboard is basically the screenplay but in drawings.
Then we had a whole butt ton of filming to do. I went through quite the roller coaster of trying to find a person to interview, but in the end I managed to have a great interview with Alex Johnson, the assistant manager at my local Gardenworks. We also had to create original music using GarageBand and I found it quite tedious but fun. And of course will al of the filming, there came even more editing. The editing was soooooo meticulous but it is a really improvement part of creating a good film. And then Ta Daaa! Documentary finished. I am super proud of the final result for this project, as it is the last maker project of my grade 9 year.
Exhibition
So as I already stated, I didn’t actually end up going to the exhibition but I will talk about the part of the process that I was a part of. Exhibitions are a chance for every grade to tell a story and answer a question, while using their work to enhance and show as an example. The grade 8s+9s worked together to tell the story of “What Does It Mean To Be A PLP Learner?” Throughout the first part of the school, and then guests would walk to the gym to see the main event of the 10/11/12s. I was part of the the conclusion of our section, where our driving question was “What is a PLP learner?”. We decided that a PLP learner was hardworking, creative, thoughtful, collaborative, and detailed.
It was our job to design the layout of our section and make all of the decor that we would need. It was a lot of work to design everything and create something visually appealing. We were also given a group of grade 8s to help us at the exhibition and give them a chance to display their work as well. Most of the work was put into the “Hall of Hard work”, where we tried to show the process of developing work to extending quality work.
Our group’s documentaries were displayed on a projector in our “Dungeon of Docs”. And I am quite disappointed that I wasn’t there to see all of the masterpieces.
We also were running some instant challenges and getting the guests to self-asses on how they preformed. As any good PLP student knows, we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflection. Self-assessment is heavily incorporated in PLP’s structure so we thought that it was a perfect showcase of what its like to be a PLP student.
And that’s it for my section of the 2022 spring exhibition!
Conclusion
So this will be my last blog post of the year. Wow. If you’ve made it this far I really want to thank you for taking the time to read these because it takes a lot personally for me to write a whole post. I’m so proud of myself and all of my classmates for making it through this year, we did it guys! Anyhoo cya in September!
