Tag: School

Colonization Consequences, A Deep Dive

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Intro

Do you know all the facts about the Colonization ‘on our home on native land’? I doubt it. We researched the impact of colonization on Indigenous communities and the lasting consequences it has had on their cultures and societies. We explored the loss of land, language, and traditions.

Re-cap

Within this project, we were tasked with making an 11-15 slide keynote that answered our question ‘What were the consequences of colonization’ in a group of three to four. We presented it twice to the grade 11 BCFP class, and they filled out a feedback form after telling us how we did. They then designed a project for us, a mini keynote that had to answer the driving question in 2 slides and 6 words in total.

Driving Question

What were the Consequences of Colonization?

Favourites

Some of my favourite moments of this project was when we were presenting to the 11’s. We have a few slides in our keynote about the exploitation of the indigenous people both in the past, and the present, many of which, Carmyn was supposed to say. In both our first and second presentation, Carmyn would say ‘exfoliation’ instead of ‘exploitation’! It was both the most hilarious and mortifying part of the projects.

Keynotes

Group

I was put into a group with Carmyn, and Gemma to research and put together the slideshow. We separated and researched diffrent parts of consequences of colonization. I took ‘Pre-Colonial Health’, Gemma took ‘What diseases did the Europeans bring’ and Carmyn tackled ‘How did the disease affect the Indigenous Peoples’. We also researched the exploitation of the Indigenous peoples, and some of the history of colonization.

We presented our finished Keynote to the grade 11 BCFP class a few days ago. During our first presentation, we had a bit of trouble getting organized, and had a hard time with our cue cards. But I can see so much progress from our first to second presentation, which is shown in the cards the 11’s filled out after watching our presentation. The first group gave us feedback telling us that we could have been more prepared, with ‘less looking down at your notes’, but the second group had no negative feedback to give. ‘I thought it was good, no real criticism.’ It felt really good to get the feedback from the 11’s, and I hope we can do more projects with the other grades. It added a lot to the project, compared to if we were just presenting to our class. It felt like we should put in a bit more effort, and that we should care a little bit more what they thought because they had so much more experience in this thing than we had.

Oy…

Throughout this project my team and I had a lot of trouble figuring out how to distribute work in a fair way while still giving people realistic amounts of work to do. Some people are just able to get more work done in a shorter amount of time, and some people can’t. This does not have to have anything to do with how hard you are working, I have come to realize that some people’s brain just work differently. I don’t think we found the ‘sweet spot’ of work distribution during this project, but I do think it is possible to make a group work while all of the members within the group contribute equally no matter who the group members are.

Mini

After presenting our Keynote, the 11’s designed our next assignment. We were asked to make a 2 slides keynote with only 3 words per pages that answered our Driving Question. I Decided to focus on three main topics, Sickness and spread of Disease, Loss of Culture, and Death. I presented it to our class, and I am very happy with how it came out. The feedback I got from Ms Mc. was to ‘really YELL next time, project out to the audience, rather than to present to one side of the room. Began to speak very quickly…’ I agree with her feedback, and I will remember to speak up and slow down next time I am presenting. It always is nice to receive feedback, both good or bad, especially from a teacher. We don’t usually get such raw feedback during the year if we don’t specifically ask, so when a list of notes and critiques showed up on my showbie, I was more than excited to see what they had to say.

RPReplay_Final1715205078

So, what happened?

Colonization led to the mass genocide of the Indigenous People in all parts of the globe. In Canada, 80-95% of Indigenous People died from things connected to colonization. All of their deaths are definitely a consequence of colonization, the consequence to me. There is no way to imagine what it would be like if no lives were lost. Colonization has affected all of us. Without it in our history, we wouldn’t be here, on this land, learning about this, in this classroom. Who knows what our world would be like if colonizers hadn’t resorted to destruction before thinking about how it may impact our lives forever.  

Sickness and spread of disease

Some of these diseases were, smallpox, influenza, measles, whooping cough, deadly to many, exposed Indigenous People to things they weren’t used to.

Loss of culture

Culture, ancestry, history, and language, wer a huge part of peoples identity and life, but the residential schools took it away. They forced indigenous people to use only a western worldview, and we are still trying to remember and reclaim the lost culture.

Death

The mass amounts of death by sickness and murder that continues to impact us now. Up to 95% of Indigenous People in Canada were lost to Colonization, only 5% of the indigenous people in canada that used to thrive made it through the period of colonization that lasted from the 15th to mid 20th century.

Craft

https://docs.craft.do/editor/d/4db0ccea-7be6-addf-cf59-5de2b7aea6e0/57490729-9226-464B-B7A5-AA1C5CAE16E3?s=KZ7L3i3wSVKKBVMfUcaQeYbK1C5XQTxgyfVcbHMX7FAX

What Time Is It? MPol Time!

cecem

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

Welcome to my MPol blog post! I will be working on retelling my PLP journey so far. Enjoy!

 

Favourite Projects!🤩

Some of the projects that we worked on this year interested me more than others, like the poem Ebook, the Scratch science game, and the Genghis Khan skit. I can see that I work better on a project when I enjoy it! I feel that I created high quality work on these three projects because they were fun to spend time on and I was excited to work hard.

Poems, Genghis, and Video games📜🕹️🥷

⬜️For our poem e-book, we answered the question, ‘How Might I Write Poems I Enjoy And Show Who I Am’. I found that I enjoyed writing these poems so much more when I chose a topic related to something happening in my life or something that is important to me. I ended up writing 10 poems including 7 different types of poems, and three haikus, about all kinds of things including cows, pigeons, barbies, and miso soup. I loved using Sketches Pro to draw the photos for the ebook, and I enjoyed writing the short and sweet Haikus. I also appreciated the freedom of writing the free verse poems.   Since I enjoyed the process and had fun with it,  I created high quality work that I was proud of.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         ⬜️In science, we were asked to code a game on scratch that creatively demonstrated our knowledge of atoms. I created a game show and a host character named A-tom. He is my favourite part of this game with his silly (and sometimes offensive) replies to your answers to the trivia questions. I am very familiar with Scratch because I used it a lot when I was younger and I also used it to animate my PLP entrance video last year. I was able to use my scratch skills to help my class mates with building their games and I really enjoyed being a helper and a leader.                                                                                                                                                                                                             ⬜️For Humanities,  Tyler, Madeline and I wrote a musical skit about Chinggis Khan, and his role as a leader. It was so much fun to write and film our little skit, and I think our final project was both hilarious and educational. We worked well together as a group and felt great about our work.

https://www.blog44.ca/cecem/2023/11/30/the-story-of-how-i-got-my-face-stuck-in-a-paintinga-work-in-progress/

https://bpb-ca-c1.wpmucdn.com/blog44.ca/dist/f/986/files/2023/11/RPReplay_Final1700254581.mov

My Life In Poems

Welcome to the A-Tom Trivia Show!

Growth🌱

A few of my projects or assignments didn’t meet my standards and weren’t my best work. I can see from my early projects that I have grown a lot since the start of the year, especially in my ability to do group work and collaborate well with my peers. I felt this was a challenge during our winter exhibition and during our It’s (not) the End of the World Project. I could also work on going deeper into my learning with all my writing including blog posts and novel studies.

Group Work👨‍👩‍👧‍👧

During the Winter Exhibition, I struggled with the teamwork aspects, especially when it came to the distribution of work. I was still getting used to collaborating with a team, and relying on other people to do important work made me nervous. In the end it all worked out, and I think my teamwork skills and my leadership skills grew from working on this project.                                                                                                                                                          The ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know It’ song wasn’t my favourite project for many reasons. The group work was problematic, and the singing was painful, but it was a great way to get to know my classmates. This was because everyone wrote lyrics about their worldview and used specifics that represented themselves as both a student and a person. We all worked together as a group better once we got to know and understand each other better.

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.

e-iceberg-and-what-time-is-it/

 

 

Going Deeper and Accepting Feedback 🕳️

It was- and still is – hard for me to do the deep thinking that takes my work from good to amazing. I know I can do it.  It is always easy for me to answer the question in a basic way but it can be harder for me to get into the right mindset to go the extra step for unique, deep thinking. My work improves so much every time I do go that extra step, and I try to make an effort to take it, but it is a challenge.

I love writing, and for my blog posts, or my poems, I wrote about things that have happened to me or around me. I need to push myself to go deeper and be more specific about how it makes me feel, or what I learned, or even how I could do better! I am not sure if I do this consistently with my blog posts, but with my poems, I do think that I took this extra step. I believe that you can see this in my poems because they all turned out so well.

For the rest of the year, I will strive to accept feedback more easily and always revise my work. If I do this, my work will be consistently better, and I will have began a new habit that will benefit me in the long run.

 

Learning Plan🖇️

As I look back at my Learning plan, I can see that I have accomplished many of the growths and skills I wrote about. I have definitely improved on my organization, helping my peers, and learning to use my technology. I will continue to grow in these areas throughout the year, getting better at them and doing them more. I am so happy to see how much I have progressed within these goals, and I know I will continue to do so forever.                                                                                                                                                                        I also mentioned that I needed help with things like organization, encouragement, respect, catching up on work, and I have gotten all of them. I also mentioned I was strong at taking feedback, taking responsibility, participation, ethics, empathy, time management, and teamwork. All of these strengths have been tested this whole year in things like the Exhibition, DI, and more, and my strengths have grown and flourished because of this.

F.A.I.L.🚨*

*irst ttempt n earning

This year, even though I have done a lot of things I am proud of, there are many things I could have done a lot better. On March 2nd, 2024, we had our very first Destination Imagination tournament, and not everything went according to plan. Our pinball machine absolutely failed, our script was way too short and mostly improv, and our pinball machine was basically four pieces of cardboard balancing on some wood. Now? It’s a completely different thing. Honestly it feels like we could write a ‘rags to riches’ story about our pinball machine. My group and I spent many hours in Ella’s garage building a new and improved pinball machine. We created a strong wooden table with many  parts. It has flippers, ramps, bumpers, and even a slingshot launcher. We spray painted it white and decorated it in the theme of Alice in Wonderland.  This machine started as an actual fail and became a perfect example of an F.A.I.L.  I am supremely proud of the amount our group improved from the first to second DI tournament.

The F.A.I.L. acronym changed my mindset from a fixed to a growth mindset and helped me look at our first  DI as a way to learn. I will do my best to continue to use this idea throughout the rest of this school year.

https://www.blog44.ca/cecem/2024/03/15/destination-imagination-what/

 

Overall, my PLP journey has been interesting and challenging. I have already grown so much, and I am excited to see where I will get by the end of the year.

It’s *not* the end of the world!

cecem3 Comments

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.