T-Pol | The epic and awesome blog

“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.”

How can you showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP success behaviours have prepared you to advance the next grade?

I can showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP success behaviours have prepared me to advance into grade 9. The success behaviour I have picked are accepting feedback, contribution, focus, and balance and these success behaviours will show you that I’m ready for grade 9!

Accepting feedback

There are two projects that have let me grow from accepting feedback;“The Wilderness Must Be Explored” and “Working With Words”

Working with Words

In this project I learned how to put my thought in to poems. In this project we made a selection of poems critiquing each one as we went along. Here’s an example of one of my poems and how I accepted feedback:

In this first draft I used some examples that are not obviously true and i got critiqued saying make the statement obvious so more people can connect to it so here’s my second draft:

Now if you liked that poem here’s a book full of them:

Now after practicing the skill of accepting feedback we had more of a challenge with our next project:

The wilderness must be explored

For this project I learned that language inspires adventure. This project was all about advertisement for Oregon and improving it! We got selected into groups for the exhibition. My group was Siena, Sam, Cole, and Elsa and we got the topic ‘excitement and escape!’ So we designed our slogan. Here it is “Escape the Ordinary, Embrace the Excitement”. So check out my first draft of this ad:

This is a rough draft and needs major feedback. Luckily i got that feedback from my peers and Ms McWillaim. My first critique was that I should change the image to something more exciting and change the font. So I changed the image to a beautiful landscape photo and drew a guy zip lining in it becuase I thought that was the most exciting part of Oregon. For the font our group chose the coffee break font:

This is my second draft and i got told it was much better! This ad still needed a lot of work. So my critique was to change my font colour for the small text from black to white.

Finally we could see the small text but not enough so i expanded the text and put it in the bottom left corner. For the slogan i got told to curve it, because it adds more pop. Also to simplify, so I deleted “it’s the place to be” and just changed it to “Oregon”. Here’s my final draft:

These projects really helped me on accepting feedback back and then applying it!

Balance

My next success behaviour is balance. Now balance can mean a lot things but, today it means balancing my time and effort. My two best examples of this are “Power play or how it started” and my “overall blog posts”. So I’m going to start off with blog posts.

My awesome and radical blog posts!

So in PLP we have to blog post just like this one. Why I’m talking about this in balance is since we do not get a lot of class time to work on blog posts. This means we have to set time aside to be able to write these blog posts and over the first few months I was struggling to make time. An example would be my winter exhibition post (link it)! I had a week to start it but, struggled making time for it so i did it in the last two days rushing it and I felt like it wasn’t my best work. After 2 more blog posts i finally realized how much easier it would be just to start it earlier and work on it so i could be done and feel relaxed. The best example of me starting early is my “Mind Over Matter” blog post. I started it a week before the dead line and when I was done I had 3 days left and was very happy with myself! Heres a link to the blog post:

https://www.blog44.ca/eloiseg/2024/06/10/small-but-mighty/#respond

This was a great example of balance but the next one is much better!:

Power Play And How It Started

In this project there was a book called “Book Of The Lion”, this book was long and didn’t really hook me. This book was split into three sections and we had a a different role each week that related to our section of the book. For the first section I was the Investigator! My job was to find information and relate it in a diagram to the book. The problem was I had a great idea but didn’t calculate my time that well and ended up rushing the book a bit because I would leave it to the last minute. That meant I had to rush my connector role. This is what I did but, keep in mind i stayed up late to make it look good! Here’s a diagram relating the book to to my Today project:

Now when I started my third section I was much more prepared. I had finished my book with a lot of time to spare meaning i could start my role much sooner. This time i was the investigator which means i find information related to the book and share it in a fun way. For this fun way i decided to make a fun video and it is very obvious the difference between the first section and the third section!!!:

Contributions

Now we have contributions, this is not only my contributions to a project but, handling my group contribution. So I have two projects to demonstrate my contribution and my groups those projects are “Destination Imagination” and “The Spring Exhibition”! So lets start with DI!!

Destination imagination

Destination imagination is where your group receives a challenge to over come while telling a story. My task was to make a catapult that throws a bean bag in the exact same spot every single time and to build a story around it. I chose this project for contribution because this is a project where everyone needs to lend a hand. I felted I contributed a lot to this project and I worked really hard on it. The hard part was learning how to get my peers interested in the project and contributing the same amount. To do this my group and I all shared what we were interested about in this project and tried putting those interests to good use by including that in our performance. Here’s some pictures of my group in DI!!!

That’s one example of me contributing to my projects but, the next one is even better, “The Spring Exhibition”

Spring Exhibition

For this exhibition I could not be there for the actual event so I felt very bad. I felt my contribution was going to be poor because of that so I decided I would contribute more to the preparation. I helped build the zip line. I brought reusable water balloons, I came up with the idea for the foods which were cookies and apple juice. I was really happy with myself because I didn’t just let myself slack off.

Focus

Focus is a big part of grade 8 because in all grade 8 classes you need to be switched on!! An example of a project I needed to stayed switched on was “Small But Mighty”! So let’s get into it.

Small But Mighty

One of the first things we did in this project was a Field Journal for a science project! Each class you had to take a picture of the experiment and make observations. For my experiment I asked a question about what cleans better, hand sanitizer or dish soap? We put bacteria on a Petri dish and put handsanitizer on one and dish soap on another. Once we had done that we needed to take pictures each day while making observations Heres some of my keynote slides of the observations.