https://open.spotify.com/playlist/56dOBm7mIdN1qrchCNUdCU?si=BqXh2H0wTcmlZvmqRl96aA
Category: Humanities
How Should We Govern Ourselves❓
2021 Election!
Hellooo and welcome back to my first blog of the school year!! I know I’m not the only one noticing the blue, green, red, and orange signs everywhere around the community because of the recent Canadian Election. Most of you know that the election starts in October not September, but in August the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau called an election early for September 20th, hope to gain a majority government.
It is now past the election since the Canadians voted on the the 20th.
Free and fair elections are one of the main and most important part of a Democracy. Although, not all Canadians are eligible to vote in elections. I believe that you need to be motivated to vote, people need to agree and understand about what the parties are advertising. And by voting it not only elects the party but you helped and now have made a big impact. People not interested in what the parties are saying, prevents people people from voting, if the people don’t know or care about what they’re voting for. They have no reason to vote. Which impacts the community in not a great way.
Something that could help motivate people to vote is to give them the right to, they want to have the chance to vote. Voters can also be worried and unsure about a topic that a candidate or party says they want to work on. Something not all people realize is, not enjoying or being for the way the government is being run, is also a motivation to vote. They don’t like how things are being run, then they vote and make that change.
I think people expected the results of the election to be as most people were saying. The Liberal Party had won, but without a majority. It would have been pretty hard for them to gain a majority because a lot of people were not happy, and disappointed that the election was called because of the pandemic. I understand how they are feeling, it was a bit of a waste of money, not to mention unsafe. But it also wasn’t completely useless, because it did help out government.
This years election had a pretty low result for Canada, possibly the lowest since 2008 when it was 58.8%. I think that that this year people didn’t vote, because they didn’t want an election to happen, they were already content with how everything was and didn’t really care about the results. These different levels of how much people cared about voting could be seen in a student election at my school too. Some people did research and wanted to voting so they are prepared when they are old enough to vote. While others weren’t thinking about that. I learnt that this election was just learning more about the election process and observing it in real time.
Continuity & Change
https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/nonsense-with-emily/id1544607276?i=1000523460245
Hello and welcome back to another blog post. Today’s topics is very interesting. In class we learnt all about continuity and change from the 1950s to today. The Deep Cove Heritage Society, has been making an effort to preserve Deep Cove’s history since 1985. What is Deep Coves history? Deep Cove has changed a lot from back then to today, and to record these changes my whole class did archival interviews for the Heritage Society. These interviews were the base and start of this project, when the driving question is, “How did Canadian life develop after WWII?”.
That’s a pretty big question to answer. And needs more thought put into it for a good thorough answer. In order for that I’m going to talk about the highlight assignments we did during this project that’s truly helps show how I got my answer for our driving question.
The first assignment I’d like to talk about is my keynote presentation explaining my choice of topic for my podcast. I chose this because I believe it clearly show off one of our competencies, continuity and change. This assignment I think was a really important milestone we did. It gave us a chance to present our ideas and thoughts which can give a whole other perspective on your topic. For my podcast topic I decided to talk about gender roles and equality with woman, my main focus was the housewife and how that was portrayed in the 50s to now. My overall presentation definitely was a big help for me and my podcast, not to mention how much I learnt about the 50s that I never knew about. It’s very interesting learning all these new things about our world, it’s crazy to think how much has changed and how much has stayed the same.
For my second assignment I chose my notes from when we watched pleasantville. A movie about two kids from 1990 get transported into a tv showed based in the 50s. Watching the movie was not only entertaining but extremely interesting. We got a whole other perspective of continuity and change from the 50s, but this time in the 90s. I enjoyed watched and learning how people lived back then. For the kids from the 90s the 50s was so weird and different, I can’t imagine how different it’d be for us to go to either decade. The world has evolved and changed a lot, but also many many things are the same, little details that are still very present today.
Pleasantville notes
For my last and final assignment I’m going to talk about my script. This covers the discuss listen, and speak competency. Of course the script is the biggest more important thing for my podcast, it’s the entire whole of it. It not only was the start of my podcast, but also part of my conclusion. Talking and discussing what I learnt with my interviewee. Hearing her interesting stories and perspective on it. It helped me gain another look on this project from someone else eyes.
Now for my conclusion. The answer to the driving question. The thing leading this all. I enjoyed this project, I learnt a lot and I’m glad I did. The driving question for this project was definitely a big one. Took a lot of thought. My answer is…
How did Canadian life develop after WWII? That’s the question we’re answering today. Canadian life changed and evolved so much, and in many ways. When the war ended Canadians realized there were many opportunities for products that will help shape and grow our world. They realized this when the baby boom came into act.
This benefited Canada a lot after the war. More lives meant more job opportunities opening up, more technology was created, and lots of mass production that was needed. The end to the second World War was a big turning point. I believe that Canada knew a big change in society was needed. So many brilliant people started creating these remarkable things, things that seemed like a dream back then. When they came out with the fridge, and television that was one of the biggest changes, and did a lot for Canadians.
Life developed so much when the war ended. It opened up a whole new perspective on life, and many life changing creations. Things we still use to this day. Over time we became smarter and started making more things that would benefit society. Im proud of how far Canada has come.
Thank you for tagging along with this blog post. I hope you found an interest in this! If you curious for more information about this topic I highly suggest you check out my classmate Malaika’s blog and listen her podcast!!
– Emily
Disney and it’s “Happy” ending
Are those endings always so genuinely happy? Does Disney ever have a sad ending? Is there ever a moment of emptiness when the movie never ended the way you hoped? No, because that’s the point. It’s suppose to take you into this wonderful fantasy reality. Make your worries disappear. For that brief moment , you keep complete, happy, fulfilled. But what next? That perfect reality is over. After the war no one wanted to hear the horrific stories, the terrible scary reality. The war was over, why continue to talk about it. Disney gave everyone that perfect escape. Who wouldn’t want to escape their problems and worries? The perfect fantasy for anyone.
In Their Own Words ~ WWII
Hello and welcome back. This past month we’ve been working on a super cool project called “In Their Own Words”. The driving question for this project was How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WW2.
World War Two is a very interesting event of our history, but it’s also pretty confusing. After all it was a world war, there are so many of important dates and battles.
In this project we would answer that question in our second podcast episodes. A lot like our most recent episode we would include a interview. It wasn’t just an interview though of course. In PLP there’s always competencies. These competencies were:
Using evidence and resources
Throughout this project there were many times I had to do research and use different sources. The way I feel I used sources and evidence best was in Milestone two. Milestone two was all about research. This Milestone was really important because all the facts and information we found is very crucial to writing and producing of the podcast.
By this time I had decided on the topic I would base my episode off of. Since my podcast is about quite literally anything. I had a very wide variety of topics to choose from. Now for some people they would like to have a big option. But for me I found it very hard to choose a topic as well as an interviewee that knows about it.
I eventually decided to go with teenagers in World War Two. How they acted and were effected by the war.
Global collaborator
We didn’t just have to do some reach and learn a couple facts about my topic, we needed to find an outside source. Someone who could back you up and teach you more. I unfortunately could not find anyone available to interview but of course we had a plan B. Instead of interviewing someone live, I found a very helpful audio clip provided by The Memory Project.
Analyzing cause and consequence
Analyzing cause and consequence was something we had many chances to revise at. Events are important but they mean nothing if you don’t understand why they began and what happened after they ended. That is why Cause and Consequence were so important to understand. The milestone I improved in this competency the most was milestone five. Milestone five was the completed podcast episode.
Responding to Text Have I constructed an original connection between myself, the text, and the world?
I believe I have made good connections to the text, as well as relating back to life today and me personally. I think I accomplished this competency in milestone 4, which was the scipt.
I feel I reached a good understanding of the causes and consequences of WWII. Telling the story gave me the chance to share facts and my thoughts on the causes and consequences. Overall I believe I learned a lot in this project and all the work we completed in this project.
After all the research, recording, writing and editing my episode is complete. I feel very proud of how it ended up. I think it answers the driving question well.
~ Emily
⚔️IT’S REVOLUTION TIME!⚔️
Hello! And welcome back to yet another blog post. But don’t worry there’s lots more to come. Now this project my class did was a very long and very time consuming one. Yes, my class did learn about the French, American, Russian revolutions and one we got to choose on our own. And I can not say this enough but this was a very long project that was kinda stressful at points. But then again what PLP project isn’t. I’m kidding (no I’m really not kidding though) this project was very fun and I really enjoyed it. For each revolution we learned about we had to create a video. There were five different types of videos we could create. John Green, Act it out, Explain Everything and Song/Rap. So everyone was put into groups of four. My group was Malaika, Gabe, and Owen. I think my group worked pretty well together, but I do wish we could have worked better on our communication and time management. Okay so anyway, let’s jump right into the first revolution!
The French Revolution ~ The first revolution we learned about was the French. My group decided we would do the song/rap video first. The first step to making this video was of course learn about the revolution itself. The second step is planning how you are going to put all the information you just learnt into a four minute video. This was pretty difficult, but we had some great tools to help us out. There were three tools we had to complete to successfully complete the video.
Tool #1 Screenplay. A screenplay is basically a script with much more detail about where the cast/crew will be at what par of each scene. My group took a bit of time to get a hang of this, but after we figured out how to do it and understood how important it was, we quickly got on top of it. Now for out screenplay it was part script part directions. Yes, a screenplay is VERY important when trying to create a movie or video. My group relied of the screenplay very much and it helped us out a lot. I think the screenplay is so crucial because without it you pretty much have nothing planned out and would have to just wing it. So yes even though took quite a lot of thought and time, we wouldn’t be able to create this video with out it.
Tool #2 Storyboard. Now a storyboard is a small presentation, I guess you could say. Well for our case we created a certain amount of drawings and animated them to show how each scene of our video would go. Our storyboard was pretty helpful and did help us a bit with the idea of where we would film and how each scene would go.
Tool #3 Call-sheet. So a call-sheet is a document that has all of the crew/cast’s information. It also includes what days everyone is free to film and where each shoot will will be taken. This is definitely important to making our video because without that information we can’t film. And would get behind on everything. And just be a whole mess.
I’m conclusion I think this video was a great first try. My group did pretty well with communicating. But I do wish we were a bit better at that. And we accomplished everything that needed to be done. So yes I think my group very well on this video.
The American Revolution ~ The second revolution we learnt about was the American revolution. We decided to do the Act it out style video. This one turned out very well I think. But again I wish we were better at communication and time management.
Tool #1 Screenplay. Our screenplay for this video was a bit rusty. We were a little stressed with other work that we lost track of time and ended up having to do it last minute. Which was not helpful and made filming very difficult. We did manage to pull it all together in the end, but it took some time.
Tool #2 Storyboard. Now our storyboard on the other hand was pretty good. This definitely helped us through filming. If we to do this again (and I know we will) I would try to work on being a bit more descriptive through our drawings.
Tool # 3 Call-sheet. Yes of course the call-sheet is very important. It does help us with knowing when we are filming and knowing where.
In conclusion I think this was one of our best videos out of the four because we worked together in the tough times and ended up creating an awesome video.
The Russian Revolution ~ The third revolution we learnt about was the Russian revolution. For this revolution we chose to do the Explain Everything video type. This one was definitely the hardest because well first it’s all just animations and my group wasn’t very good at that. It was easy to do the drawing part but when it came to the actual animation part it was very difficult for us. If we were to do more videos with animations I would like to learn more about them.
Tool #1 Screenplay. You know what the screenplay is. We used this screenplay for our script and what type of drawing/animation we would create.
Tool #2 Storyboard. For this revolution we did not do a storyboard because with the type of video we were doing it would just be the same thing but as a very rough draft. Which would be fine but since this style video was so difficult we needed as much time as we could to put towards our animations.
Tool #3 Call-sheet. Pretty self explanatory, you should know by now what it is. But we used this for our communication. We did get better at our communication which trust me is so so so important.
In conclusion i think my group did okay with this video but it was pretty new for us even though we had worked with animations before we were very rusty and probably could have used a refresher. But anyway I think this was a good attempt at this style of video.
Our Choice Revolution ~ And for our final revolution my group decided to do the French Revolution once again because we knew the most about the French and we knew we could do better then our first because we had now done three videos and have more experience.
Tool #1 Screenplay. Now since this was our last video about revolutions we wanted to really succeed and do our best. So we took this one very seriously. We were focused and got everything done on time. So our screenplay was done very well and it helped us out so much.
Tool #2 Storyboard. Now for our storyboard we did a rough drawing of how each scene would go. This did change later on as we realized that we wanted to change how our video went. Everything did work out, even with the big change in the middle.
Tool #3 Call-sheet. This call-sheet was very important. We to have this done early because something we struggled with in the past was time management. This was been very difficult for my group and we knew it was because we did not get the first steps done in time to plan out and film our video. Now that we know we will be more prepared and stay on top of things.
In conclusion I think this was our best video, yes there were so rough spots but we figured it out and successfully accomplished this revolution project. I think me and my whole group did well with all of our videos. And we definitely learnt a whole lot about pre-production and post-production (if you don’t know what that is, I did a big explanation about that in my other blog post called i don’t like anything horror)
And finally it’s time to answer the driving question. How do ideas drive change? Well I think idea drive change because everyone is always coming up with amazing ideas. Some people take those ideas and create something out of it. Others don’t, instead they chose to keep them to their selfs. Which is okay. But for the people who decided they wanted to do something with their idea and put it to good use. That’s how ideas drive change. There are so many amazing things in our world that started from just a simple idea. But those people knew they wanted to make a change, so they took their idea and made it an reality. Without these people who are brave and know that even if their idea is a small one, it still makes a big change to your life and to other people’s life that are all around you. So don’t be afraid to share your ideas I bet it would come in handy at some point.
– Emily ✌️
📝Alberta Field Study Reflection📝
So this year we went on a trip to Alberta. If you have read my other blog post you would know about our big project there. But this post is mostly talking about our focus and behaviour there. Now in Alberta there were a couple of little projects we did. And throughout the trip we needed to stay focused and accomplish all our videos. And I forgot to say that all the little projects we did in Alberta were short videos. And if I’m being honest it was hard for me to stay focused while doing it. There were somethings that I could have done to help me stay on topic. So I’m going to talk about my two favourite videos which were also the more difficult ones.
I’m going to start with talking about how I stayed on topic and focused during this trip. I’m gonna honest, it wasn’t easy to stay focused and at times I feel like I lost my focus and could have stayed on track better. But it is hard to stay focused when you’re always around your friends and on a overnight trip. So I’m just going to be talking about those two projects and how I did my best to stay focused and finished on time.
The focus for all of our videos is making and editing videos. Whether it be remaking a video or creating one of our own, we are learning about how to film, edit, and plan for making a video. The first video we made in Alberta was the a Ghost Town Video. One of our first educational stops in the trip was at the Three Lake Valley Chateau. At the Three Valley lake Chateau there is a ghost town made up of old buildings brought from old towns or build there in the Chateau. All of these buildings were made over 100 years ago and in the town it includes a barbershop, a saloon, a sheriffs office, and a hotel. This one was so much fun but because it was fun made it a bit hard to stay focused. If you would like to watch the video itself I’ll have in below. Now this one was one of my favourites because we got to go to an actual ghost town. This place we went to was really creepy it has old mannequins everywhere. And all the buildings were imported from other old rundown towns. Anyway back to the project. I do think I could have gotten things done quicker and easier if my whole group and I worked more on our time usage. Something big things that would have been helpful are making a check list of what we needed to get done and when it should be done, or we could have had a big talk as a group and talk about who’s doing what and when it needs so be finished. So that’s what I’m going to focus on for next project for sure.
Second video I’m going to talk about is the Royal Tyrell Museum. This was a dinosaur museum and what we needed to do was create a individual video that was about 1 minute long in a time length of 40 minutes. Now that sounds easy but with all the filming and editing and recording audio it’s makes it pretty hard. And since it was a big museum we used a lot of that time finding an exhibit to do our video on plus the time to get there. Now since we had no idea what sort of video we had to create until our teachers told us when we got there that didn’t give us much time to plan. And as you know planning is VERY important when creating a original video from scratch in 40 minutes. I think I did okay with my dinosaur video but I did get a little stressed at the end because I still needed to edit but I was running out of time. Next time I would definitely even out my time because I found that I was only focusing on one scene when I should have been focusing on the other more important things.
Last thing to talk about, my final Alberta video. Now this was the most important and informative one of them all. This video was about how we answered the driving question. I’m not going to go into detail with it but I will link my other blog post that explains all about it. I think I did good with managing my time well. I included everything I wanted to include and I think I did pretty good with explaining the driving question. But I would’ve liked to get more interviews. I had two in my video but I wish I had gotten more. This was one thing I would try harder at next time. One other thing would have liked to fix would be my intro. I just think I could have made it more informative. But I do believe I did good overall. I will put in my Alberta video you you guys can watch it for yourself and see if you agree with me.
In conclusion I think the biggest thing I will work on for next project would definitely be my use of time. This was a bit of a problem for me and I wish I took it more seriously in Alberta. I think my focus on this trip was pretty good. There were a few things I would like to get better at, but overall I managed to stay calm and remember that even though we weren’t in school, we still needed to do schoolwork. I think it was a pretty successful trip for me because I managed to finish the projects in time and in my opinion they were pretty good and definitely proud of how they turned out.
– Emily ✌️
🏔 Alberta 2019 🏔
New year, new project. You know what that means! It’s blog post time. After quite an interesting week of bus rides and interviews. I finally got my answer to the driving question. How does place impact who we are? Well to be exact the question is How does place impact wildlife? Now for you to understand why isn’t changed to wildlife we need to go a couple days before we left for our 9 day long school trip to the Rockies. About three days before we left, everyone in my class was put into people groups. Well when I say people groups, I literally mean people groups. For example there were groups like Business owners,Tourists, Albertans, Artists, First Nations, Students and Wildlife. Wildlife was my people group. Each group had the driving question changed just a bit, just to fit their people group. So basically the reason we were put into these groups was to get a deeper explanation of our modified driving question. Like I said mine was How does place impact wildlife? It did take a whole week of taking notes and interviewing workers and asking questions for me to get the answer I was looking for. We did also have to do a little bit of pre trip research. This just helped us get a better understanding of the place we were going.
Now what we actually had to do for the project was create a video answering the driving question. We went to so many places, but the two that really took my attention was the Northern Lights Wildlife Centre and Leo’s Buffalo Ranch. These two place were so amazing and interesting (Not saying the other places weren’t, they were all quite amazing) they also helped me out with my video. Like I had said before we are making a video and we had to include some interviews as well. One other thing we did during the trip was daily notes. This just helped us keep on top of our work. And every once in a while we had to answer a question about the place we went to that day.
I had two main Focusses for my video. Northern lights wildlife centre in Leo’s buffalo ranch. Both of these places give me such great information. They both gave me two different looks on the driving question. First let’s talk a little bit about the wildlife center. Bradley, The worker we interviewed plus more about the animals and how climate change is really changing their environment. This help me answer the driving question because their place is changing because of us humans. This was something I really needed to include my video the first answer the question and second to spread awareness. We are making it very difficult for animals and humans, to live in this world.
Sorry I went a little off topic, now let’s talk about Leo’s buffalo ranch. I’m gonna say this place was my favourite. Leo was such an interesting person, and he definitely showed me lots of cool things about buffalo. The reason I included this interview in my video was because whenever Leo talked about the land and the resources it sounded like he was very passionate about it. I noticed that and I felt like it was important to add.
All the places we went to definitely helped me make my way to answering the question. But now you get to be the judge on how well I did it!
I personally think I did quite well with answering the question. I love this trip so much. I look at Alberta way differently than I ever did before. Now I see it is such a historical an important place that I was lucky enough to go to.I hope next year we go on another trip it will be as good as this one.
– Emily ✌️
🌎It’s the end of the world project review🌎
So this term we did a project called it’s the end of the world as we know it. (based on the song) What we did was recreate the lyrics to tell the story of how our transition from elementary school to high school changed our worldview, but also trying to keep the beat the same.
And then after we had a good copy of the song, we had to sing it with the music track. While recording we learnt how to use garage band. And that how we created our songs. Before this project I had no idea how to use garage band, but now it fun to just fool around and create random music. Anyway back to the project, after we were all done recording our songs, we were put in groups and had to combine all of our songs into the one awesome song. After that we each had to pick about 10 pictures from grade 7 and grade 8 and put it together to make a video to go with our song. And after you were done that we had to sing the song all together in garage band. And to be honest ours didn’t sound super bad!
some mild stones we did was the triple venn diagram
A couple other ones were the song recording and the video collage. (it is at the bottom if you wanted to see it) Over all I felt stressed out, excited and happy. I really enjoyed this project
And I learnt a lot of things like how to use garage band or that I’m not very good at singing, but I really thought this project was super fun and entertaining!
If you want to hear our group song here it is!
– Emily ✌️