Have you ever read ‘The Outsiders’? Heard the song ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know It’? Rewritten the song? Made a music video out of it? Posted it on your brand new Youtube account? Well… I have!
Role Sheets
I have completed all of these things and would like to tell you about the process. As we all read the novel by S. E. Hinton, we filled out role sheets which are work sheets about the chapters. We read around five chapters at a time, and then filled out these sheets on our iPads. We then shared the sheets with our group once a week, and reflected on our work. The role sheets show our teachers that we understand what we’re reading. By doing this, I not only better understand the reading but it also helped me practice critical thinking, and going deeper into what I have learned.
The Book
Overall I thought the book was alright. I see why people like it and why it’s been so culturally impactful but I personally didn’t find it as engaging as other books I’ve read. I feel like it was more of a success because the author was so young when she wrote it, and it might not have been because of the book itself. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a good book, but it was an amazing book for a sixteen year old to write, and it would have not been so impressive if some middle aged man wrote it.
Memes
In the ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know It’ project, we created two memes, one for the Western vs Other world view, and one for our expectation vs reality of high school. For the Western vs Other worldview, I made a stereotypical ‘Karen’ complaining that she is never safe in a place full of ‘gays and drag queens’. This meme represented the idea that Karen is afraid of ideas that aren’t dangerous to her while, there is so much actual danger going on in the world that she isn’t focusing on. In the other Meme, we were asked to showcase how we expected high school to be, vs how it really is. I chose to show how hard I expected it would be to open my locker, vs the fact it is not that that hard at all. We used pages to make both Memes, and did it in groups of two or three. We made the memes so that we had to think about both subjects and consider our worldviews in a deeper way. I’m really enjoying using all these aspects of technology and becoming better and better at navigating them.
Song
The part of the project we took the most time with was the ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know It’ song. After listening to it many times, we were tasked with re-writing the lyrics of the song, making it represent our worldview and how it was changing because of our transition from Elementary to high school.
After I wrote my version of the lyrics, we were put into groups and we made another version of the lyrics- yep, another whole song to write!
We wrote lines like, ‘It’s the start of Seycove and it’s not easy’ and ‘Slow it down a notch, lockers, rush, help me please’. We these lines to try to explain how we felt about school and how this change to high school is impacting us.
After our group made our final version of the song, we recorded ourselves singing it, and created a music video. We made it on iMovie, using photos of us over the years.
I found it more difficult to write the song in the group than I did on my own, but it was nice to share the workload. It was hard to agree on which lyrics we each wrote and sang but overall I’m pretty happy with our end product.
I found the first few PLP projects very big and difficult. Now that I’m getting better at the technology and have a few assignments under my belt, it’s getting easier. The projects are still challenging but they don’t feel as impossible anymore.