Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post! Unlike my past blog posts this year, this is going to be a mPol post. I’m excited to be writing this because I think I’ve done a lot of good learning that I want to share. Even though I’ve only done 3 projects with PLP so far this year, I put a lot of time and effort into each one. Throughout this post, I will be taking you on a somewhat summarized journey of my school year thus far. I will be talking a lot about what I learned and also where I think I could have done better in my learning so far this year. If I think that I could have done better, I want to talk about how I could improve on that in the future. I will also be revisiting my learning plan to talk about where I reached the goals that I’ve set for myself this year.

Declaration of learning;

“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am an expert of 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 offering feedback I can use to improve as a learner.”

Projects!

So as I mentioned above, we’ve only done 3 projects this year with PLP. To start the year, we did a project on the BC gold rush. We focused specifically on the people who were involved with it and how the entire thing shaped the BC that we know today. There was a lot of self-directed research that had to happen once we picked our group of people. This was somewhere where I had a major fail. I had pages and pages of research only to realize at the end that I forgot to cite everything and link/write down the sources. This was a big learning opportunity for me because I have not forgotten to write down sources ever since. It was very painstaking to have to go back through all of my information and find the write articles/sources again. Below, you can see all of the research that I did ⬇️

Besides learning that life lesson, I of course learned a lot about the BC gold rush. Since I’m originally from California and learned a lot about the California gold rush in school, it was interesting for me to see how the people from the California gold rush influenced the BC gold rush. In the end, the topic that I picked was ‘Women in Mining’. I wanted to learn about the role women had in the BC gold rush. To be more specific, the role they had in physical mining. Not the saloon girls or the nurses. I wanted to learn about the women who got their hands dirty. In the end, I settled on basing my final product around Cathrine Schubert. When her husband died, she went to the mines herself as the first female miner. Below you can see the character card that I filled out about her after much research:

Finally, something really big that I learned in this project was creative writing. The final product that we made was a piece written about our topic in historical fiction. I used Cathrine Schubert who I had made my character card on the person who I wrote about. In the end, the way that I decided to extend was to write the majority of my piece from the perspective of Cathrine’s journal entries. I wanted to make it seem like they had been rediscovered and were being published for the first time. I spent a lot of time writing but also arranging what I had written in a way that looked like it was from a journal. This is somewhere that I think I did well. I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a creative way to portray what I had written. As soon as I got the idea to make journal entries, I was set. I had a very clear image in mind and I’m very happy to say that I delivered exactly what I was thinking. Below you can see the final product that I made ⬇️

Final Product for Women in Mining

Another project where I think I learned a lot was called Ology of Apology. We looked into racist actions governments had taken against people and the apologies that were later issued for these acts. I learned a lot about what made a good apology and what made a bad one. Something that I spent a lot of time on and worked hard on was my primary source chart. This was where we did a lot of research on an event that we chose. I ended up choosing the Japanese internment that happened in Canada. I went through a lot of different pictures and government documents to try and get a better understanding of what the Canadian government did to the Japanese Canadians. For each primary source, I spent a lot of time trying to fully understand what was being said directly or indirectly. This was a really important stepping stone that we did in this project because it was the founding knowledge that we would go back to and refer to many times. Unlike with the first project, I learned from my mistakes and made sure to cite all my sources so that I wouldn’t have to go back and fix them. Below you can see the work I did on my primary source chart ⬇️

The end product for this I am proud of. I spent a lot of time on it and I spent a lot of time working on it…maybe too much time. Anyways, I wanted this piece to have a lot of symbolism as it would be going in the winter exhibition. The end goal for this project was to be a sort of memorial for our topic. And I think that me and my partner Cooper did that. We had a very clear image in mind and overall I think we were able to execute that image very well. Doing this specific group project definitely made me a stronger group collaborator. I had a very set idea of what I wanted to do and looking back I can see that I was a little bit stubborn in not wanting to move away from that idea. Cooper had a similar but different idea and it took a lot of thinking and teamwork to be able to mash our two ideas together. In the end, I really like the way that we did it. Besides learning how to collaborate better, I learned how to make origami paper boats. You can check out the final project we did for the exhibition below ⬇️

The last project that we tackled this year was Romeo and Juliet. I’m very happy with our end product. We spent a lot of time coming up with the script, filming, and editing. Something hard for me in this project was reading the original Shakespearian play and interpreting it. So, I decided to push myself outside my comfort zone and read almost every time. This not only made me pay attention to what was being said, but it also helped me understand what was being said better by actually saying it. Something that I spent a lot of time (maybe too much time) working on was my theme book. I really wanted to show that I had an in-depth understanding of what was happening. I spent extra time making sure that I had really good connections to adaptations and chose that as my way to extend. In the end, what was supposed to be a 5 page assignment turned into a 13 page one…You can check out my theme book ⬇️

Throughout this project, there were many ups and downs. We didn’t have a solid idea of what we wanted the storyline for our final product to be for quite a while. That’s something that I hope to improve on in the future. Sticking to one idea and not trying to overcomplicate things. Something that I learned was how much music can affect the mood of a film. It was amazing the see our short story go from kind of bland to pretty amazing with just the background music being added. You can check out the final product below ⬇️

Learning plan, where am I at?

Overall, I’m very proud of my work so far this year. One of my goals for myself was to get extending in every subject. So far, I have been able to achieve that goal in Humanities. I’ve tried very hard to put as much effort as I can into the work that I’ve done. I’m very proud to say that I haven’t gotten a sun all year. This is pretty unrealistic for me to maintain until the end of the school year, but it’s a big goal that I want to try and accomplish. Looking at my learning plan that I had set at the beginning of the year, here are some goals I reached and how I think I reached them:

Humanities –

I’ve pretty much reached my goal of not getting overwhelmed by the workload by taking the time to write down and manage my time in Things. I made sure that I had deadlines and that I had a doable amount of work at all times. The only time that I had a fail at this was with my theme book for Romeo and Juliet. I handed it in 2 days late because I bit off more than I could chew and had so much to say that it took me an extra 2 days to write it all down. I did get overwhelmed with that, but that was completely my fault. Below you can take a look into my Things organization and what I wrote for my learning plan ⬇️

Another goal that I had down at the beginning of the year was fixing my grammar and spelling. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to have no spelling errors or anything in my writing. After being almost halfway done with grade 10, I now know that is a very very unrealistic goal. I do still read my work over a few times to try and catch any silly mistakes which are definitely something that I will continue to do. Below you can see what I wrote for my learning plan ⬇️

Learning Intent –

A big thing that I was missing last year was a social and school balance in my life. Something that I wanted to focus on this year was having that balance. I’m happy to say that I’ve been able to achieve that. In the end, I’ve been trying to take school not necessarily less seriously but to less of an extreme than I had been doing in grade 9. This is something that I would like to keep up until the end of grade 10.
Something else that I talked about was going in for tutorial. Last year, I saw it as this looming fear that I would get called into tutorial time because I forgot to hand something in or something wasn’t done. This year, I’ve tried to take a different look at it. I realized at the beginning of grade 10 that it didn’t have to be scary. In fact, it’s a very useful tool. So, when I’ve felt behind on a project, I’ve gone into tutorial time and utilized that extra hour of work time.

Below you can check out my learning intent statement ⬇️

 

In the end, I’ve been really proud of my work so far this year. I enjoyed all of the projects that we have done for one reason or another. I’ve learned a lot of valuable life lessons like making sure to cite your sources and more content-based learning like about how Californians influenced and helped shape the BC gold rush. Thank you for reading this post about my mPol.

Best wishes,

-Dana