Hellloo and welcome back to my blog! Now today is a special post and important because it’s T-POLs time! For those who don’t know what a T-POL is let me give you a quick explanation. A T-POL stands for transitional presentation of learning. T-POLs are the way to fully reflect on the learning, improving, and challenges in the year. It has been a while since we have done T-POLs since covid last year kind of messed things up. But we are back and I’m ready.

This T-POL is going to be focused on the improvement I made over grade 11. First point I want to say is this year has been difficult for me, I’ve had a lot of events happen that held me back quite a bit and effected me long term. With that said I feel I have held together and accomplished a lot given my situation. It has been a tough year, but I’m proud of the achievements I made and goals I completed. 

To take a step back and truly answer the question for this years T-POLs: Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level? Let’s talk about the goals I made in my M-POLs. 

I know the goals I made were strong and important. One of the goals I set was: I will keep my organization skills up and work hard to try and meet the next level of the “profiles” in my Learning Plan. I feel I had a rocky year with my organization and staying on top of work. Although the project I feel I most improved on this goal was the Sounds of Poetry project.  With this project we worked on studying poetry and the concept behind some poems and song lyrics. We then chose 5 songs that reflected you, you could interpret that in anyway you wanted. I chose to pick my songs based on how I have many moods and “personalities” I experience daily.  I want to express how my mind is a little bit different, and works it’s own way. This project I truly enjoyed because I felt free to express myself, and I didn’t hold back.  I did well with staying on top of assignments as well as completely the main component on time and in good quality. I feel confident saying this was the project I improved most on my organization goal.

The next goal I set in my M-POLs was: I’m going to work on my time management and organization skills so I can use my time most efficiently. The project I found most challenging for this goal was the persuasive text project. The project was to choose a topic you agree on and an audience that has the opposite opinion to that topic, and then write an essay convincing them of your side.  I struggled a lot with this project because I had a really hard time thinking of a topic I was confident enough about to write a whole essay about to convince my audience. Overall I feel I could have preformed much better with this project. I’m not fully satisfied with how I used this goal. I’m not going to lie, this goal was difficult and I didn’t improve on it how I wanted. Which again, given my situation I won’t beat myself up for. I’ve struggled quite a bit in the past with time management and using my time well. It’s always been a challenge for me for as long as I can remember. And probably will always effect me. But it’s how I learn to manage and continue on with improving, that’s so important.

 If you asked me in the beginning of the year if I thought I would be happy and accomplished by the end of grade 11, I would have told you that’s impossible. But I’m happy to say I am. This year, although it was extremely difficult, I also learnt a lot about myself as a learner. Which is very important if you ask any PLP teacher. Now to clearly answer our T-POL question: Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level? Even though I didn’t improve on my goals for physical work or time management. I know I’ve improved as a person, student, and as a learner. I’ve learn how I can help myself when times get tough in school, and straight up just how my brain works, which I know will be helpful for next year. With what I’ve gone through the past year, I’m glad I’m in the place I’m in now. I feel ready and excited for new improvements next year. I’ve collected a lot of knowledge over this year, and reflecting during writing this, I can say in confidence, I will make new goals and accomplish all the goals I had set. I know next year will be a challenge, and quite scary. But I am ready to learn and excited for the path ahead of me. 

Thank you so very much for listening to my T-POLs today! See you next year!

~ Emily!

Heyo! Welcome back to my blog! Todays post is about our newest project. The recent Canadian federal election just took place, so for our first big project this year, it’s all about creating our own political party, and our views and ideas on how the government should be run and structured. We use the information we learnt about the Canadian government and its structure from our classes, and lectures. We were put into groups, with similar views. My group consists of Ciara, Kaia, fraser and me! 

The party we created is called the Egalitarian Party of Canada, EPC for short.  Our party is based on the principles of equality to bring all of Canada together. Take a look at our statement of intent poster “Our mission is to build an economically strong, environmentally sound, and increasingly diverse Canada through our political plan”

Our party is unique and special because, instead of forcing people away from each other based on wealth, and taxing the wealthy out of all their money. Our mission is to set up government programs where the more wealthy can donate straight to the less fortunate. These programs will impact them and their communities greatly.

We plan to make sure diversity at many levels of government by making sure that all the people of Canada, with different backgrounds, ethnicities, gender, sexuality, that they are included in every government establishment by providing education, training and making sure opportunities are there for everyone, and anyone in need. 

We will also correct the current unsuccessful voting system that we use today. The Canadian people actually choose to vote for the party more precisely represented, not only federal but local as well. 

The Egalitarian Party of Canada is a open minded liberal party, who’s goal is bringing Canadians together through equality and diversity. 

Our main and more important priorities are, allowing the more wealthy the chance to give of their own free will instead of taxing out of it, changing the electoral system to a Proportional Representation system, ensuring diversity in all governmental institutions by providing the necessary tools to those individuals.

Thank you for learning about our political party today! I hope you find an interest to our party, vote EPC!

What is identity? 

It can mean many things from different peoples perspective. I personally think identity is many many things.

Identity is who you are. It’s your race, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, beliefs, values, appearance, career, upbringing, worldview, location, name, age, and everything else that makes you, you.

Such as where you’re from. Where you were born or where your ancestors are from. It can also mean your interests, whether it be the sport you play or your hobbies, what you’re known for in school or your biggest accomplishment. It’s how you identify yourself. Whether you imagine yourself as maybe short and friendly or you’re super tall and kind of shy, but when you’re near people you know like your friends or family, you’re the friendly person there.

Identity means a lot of things. I think it’s mostly what you think of yourself, how do you identify yourself. Just like it’s your choice and your challenge if you want to change your identity. Your identity is customized to be you. Your unique and your identity is unique. Never be ashamed of your identity, be prove of who you are. 

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Here’s how I imagine a little part of my identity in a picture. It’s hard to express who you are in just a few images. Here I show two things I think are a big part if who I am.

*Peep Ciara in the bottom corner :)*

~ Emily

Hello and welcome back! If you didn’t already you, school is officially coming to an end. And that means I’ve made it through grade 9!! I honestly might even miss it a bit. Just a bit. To finish off humanities this year we did a project all about WW1. So for this project we had to pick a soldier who fought in the war, as well as a event that occurred WW1. Since just researching and doing a little essay is boring, and plus not very informative . Our teacher came up with a great idea! To turn it into a book. So we had are chosen solider and event, we research about them and put al the researcher into 4-6 pages. Once we got approved our teacher put it into our class book! Now enough of explaining lets talk about the project itself and the process.

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Over all we had 5 milestones. Each one helping us get to the finally completion. In my opinion I think there were 3 really crucial milestone. First one was our solider stories. I think this one is  important because it is the whole base and all the information you need for the first part of the topic pages. Second one is definitely the topic pages themselves. Without them its not really a book. Down below I have put my topic pages. For my solider I did Harry Edward Kerr, and for my event I chose the Halifax Disaster. We had a choose to have our topic pages, 4 pages or 6 pages. I originally done just 2 pages but Ms. Maxwell had told me if I do 4 I would able to put in so much more good information, so thats just what I did. I decided to use 3 of my 4 pages for my event and the other 1 pages for my solider. Over all I think my topic pages worked out quite well. They had lots of great information and they looked very organized and easy to understand.

The other part of our WW1 project, was a book chat. We everyone was assigned into groups and a book that was based around WW1. The book we got for our group was called War Horse. And so every week each group was assigned certain amount off pages to read and then we would have little jobs we called them, there was summarizer, artist, Discussion Director and driving questioners. I think the book chats were a good way to help understand the WW much better. Definitely for me, I found that as i was reading the book, I understood how the people felt. It most definitely helped me become for specific with my topic pages.

Overall I think I did pretty well with this project. I did well on my topic pages with description and clear understanding. And I’m really proud of my teacher and my class for putting together a whole book, all about the history of WW1. This project was super fun and definitely a great way the end the year!

See you all next year!!

~ Emily

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! Today I’m going to be talking about a fun topic. My dream job. Now this did take a long time for me to decide on, but i finally made a decision. One of my all time favourite things to do it bake. I love it so much. I love how there’s no limit with flavours and decorations. 

I’ve never really knew exactly what i wanted to be when I was younger. And I still don’t know what school I want to go to, or what I want to study. But I do know that baking is one of my passions. I’ve been baking for a while now, but i never really realized how much I love it! So I may not know what I want to be when I’m older but I do know that there’s always a good place to start. And for me that my love for baking.

For a while now I’ve wondered, how successful could I be in the baking business? I hear how hard it is to make money, because the process tales so long. I made a 3 tier cake and it took 12 hours, so you can imagine the time it would take to make an entire wedding cake! The whole process if so much fun, even though I always make a huge mess, its so worth it. Plus what baker doesn’t make a mess, thats fun part!

I know the reality of becoming a baking isn’t very common, but I just know it would be so amazing. I would get to go to a job that I love everyday. And who knows maybe I’ll even get to open my own bakery. Wouldn’t that be fun. Man that would be a dream come true.

Just recently I talked to my parents about getting more baking supplies so I can practice on technique. And since quarantine I’ve made so many cakes I practically know the cake recipe by heart!

I’ve done some research school wise, and there is an amazing baking, pastry and culinary art. It’s called Pacific Institute of Culinary Arts, and it’s located right here in Vancouver. Tuition Fees range from $20,000 – $40,000.

If I was able to get into this school, I might actually be able to have a profession in baking! That would honestly be a dream come true. And of course its going to take a lot of time and carful consideration, but I think I could actually have my dream profession. I’m willing to work for it. If I have a chance to do what I love then there’s no way I’m turning that down.

Also I know you didn’t ask, but I’m going to show off my most recent cake because I was pretty proud to it. I made this one for my mom’s birthday.

Anyway thank you for listening! 

~ Emily

   Hey there! welcome to my tPOL! As the summer comes right around the corner, all I want to do is go to the beach and enjoy the sun, if we ever get any. Unfortunately that will not come true quite yet, since the whole terrible pandemic thing going that you’ve probably heard of. On the bright side, summer break is still summer break , even though we might be stuck inside all day. I can make my own beach!

Now, its time to get into what we’re all really here for. I’m here to explain why am I ready to move onto grade 10. In my other tPOL I did it mostly project based. I wanted to do something a bit different this year. Since I have two main struggles, I thought I would talk about my two goals I wish to accomplish during grade 10.

   Going into grade 10 is a big accomplishment for me, It means I’m halfway through high school. And if you ask my I think that pretty important.

Ever since I was younger I’ve always had a bit of trouble with staying on topic and focusing as well and getting things in on time. I have tried many things to help me work on that but nothing seems to click. The number one thing that grade 9 has taught me was you really need to work hard for some if you really want it. So that could mean a good grade or being confident with the work you have finished. My 2 goals going into the next grade I will apply to all subjects and my personal life.

Up first is goal 1!

Goal #1.

Staying focused and on topic while doing my work, whether that be school work or at home.

 

   In the past year we’ve done many many MANY projects, some of which I felt I succeed in more then others. On the other hand, there were multiple projects which I failed to complete or meet standards. While writing this it really made me realize how I am as a learner. I am a student that need some sort of interest in the things I do, so that way if I enjoy what I’m doing, I’m so much more likely to finish well. If I’m interested in what I’m doing then I will get it done better. The way I can do this is by instead of just doing what was assigned, I can do more, and find it more interesting so I will take my time doing it and not rushing just to get it done.

I’ve always been a bit disorganized with keeping my work under control, and often have trouble prioritizing and balancing the academic and social parts of school. 90% of the time I am missing the organization and prioritize skills, without them it leads me to unable to concentrate for a certain amount of time. Even in writing this I’ve gotten distracted a bit more then I’d like to admit. An example could be our Confederation Commercial project. I got carried away trying to perfect the little assignments like stepping stones, when my focus should have been on the more important assignments, the milestones. I honestly believe that I did not help or contribute to this project as much as I should. 

And now moving on to my second goal.

Goal #2.

Make sure to stay on top of things, as well as keeping a positive and open mindset.

I’ve heard that grade 10 is when high school starts to become more challenging. I’m always up for a good challenge but I have a feeling that next year will be pretty difficult for me. Which means getting behind and losing track of my work. In order to stop that I need to start asking for help instead of shutting down and giving up when things get hard and I can’t understand. I am a kinesthetic learner, I need some sort of visual so help me concentrate and understand, and that has been one of my set backs ever since I was little, definitely in math and science. Math is the one subject that no matter how hard I try to considerate and focus, I can’t seem to get the hang of it. I have always struggled and broken down under the pressure of not understanding math as quickly or easily as my other classmates do.

This year has been a big example of that. For every project that we did the minute that I didn’t understand something I would get stressed out and fall behind instead of getting help. This didn’t happen during every project, it did when I was uncomfortable with the people I was in a group with or expected to understand something that I was really confused over. This is where I would lose all my concentration in Scimatics. There were rare times where I completely understand what we were working on and felt confident with my work.

Science and math have never been my strong suit, but I’m determined to not give up, I’m going to try my best, in my own way to make sure I understand what I’m doing. If that means asking more questions or getting a tutor maybe, or just more confidence throughout the year. it’s my goal to have a good positive mindset going into grade 10.

  Over the year that seemed to be unbelievable short, grade 9. I have had troubles and failures, successes too. Each project has taught me a lesson. Not just about how I work, but how I can improve my work. Once the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and we were all quarantined I had to get my head in the game, I had to up my game a lot, and work hard to improve my skills or I wouldn’t have been able to get any work done. I am determined to get to where I want to be so I can only exceed in learning. And finally to end this tPOL, I have a question to ask myself.

In the next up coming school year, how can I as a person accomplish my goals as a learner, including all the challenges I will face, how can I become a more successful me? That what I want to know for next year. 

Thank  you for listening! 😀

~ Emily

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be talking about our Scimatics project called Time is Money. In this project, we created a product or service to sell where we analyzed the income, costs, and time used to figure out if it would be a good service or not as a business prospect. 

Driving question: How can we predict our finances for the future?

Understanding and solving: Apply multiple strategies to solve problems in both abstract and contextualized situations. 

I think that I did a pretty good job with this competency because I had all my time, materials and equipment accounted for in the cost of making my product and performing my service. 

Communicating and representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial and symbolic form.

My graph was labelled and explained pretty well, but I still I feel like I could’ve made is much better. Although I had everything I needed,, and overall it was pretty well done, I didn’t do the prediction for my NET earnings for more then three products.

Connecting and reflecting: connect mathematical concepts to each other and to other areas and personal interests.

I don’t think I did a very good job with this competency because my video could’ve compared my new business to other ones more. Plus, I didn’t really talk about if my business can cover my costs of living or operating and it’s sustainability on the environment or not. And in my video I didn’t do as much explaining as I could have done.

Overall, I really enjoyed getting to learn about linear equations and learning how to calculate your profit in a real-life business using those linear equations. And I do think my project did turn out pretty well. Although next time I’d like to add a little more colour to my explanations to make them more clear and understandable. 

~ Emily

Heyyyy welcome back!! Today I’m going to be talking about my maker calluses most recent project called Witness To History. In this project, we made videos that would explain how a community of our choice has been affected by this pandemic including of social distancing and self isolation and quarantine. This project’s driving question was “How can we, as storytellers, tell stories of our community during this period of physical distancing?”. The community that I chose was students. But first, before I get more into that, let’s go through the milestones we did before the final product.

First we made our story telling diagram, which would help us narrow down our ideas and form our videos in a story form. Here was mine:

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?I think that I could have done better in this competency because I didn’t add much detail, and i could have added more information because I only had about one sentence in there.

In our next milestone, we made our own music that we would play in our video. This was very difficult for me because I couldn’t decide what sort of style I wanted it to be.

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?
I think I did pretty well with this competency because I became more familiar with GarageBand and how to make my own music. I think it sounded pretty good for one of my first songs that I’ve made myself for a project.

In our fourth milestone, we started to brainstorm more about how to be video would look like. We really had to visualize what clip and angles each shot would be. Here was my storyboard:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?

Be an Active Digital Citizen: How might I use technology to connect to the world?
I think that I did pretty well in these competencies, My video didn’t really end up looking exactly the same as how I imagined it, but I think that it was still a good for what I wanted my video to look like and what shots I wanted to go out and get for my video.

Next was our actual final video! Here’s how mine turned out:

Be an Empowered Learner: How might I use technology to learn more?
I think that I did pretty well with this competency because I didn’t just show what we were supposed to have in our videos, but I included some comedy which I think always makes things more interesting and fun to learn.

I really liked this project. It was fun to get to learn new things, like making music in GarageBand. I also had a ton of fun getting all my clips and shots for my video, it was really fun to actually go out and get some film. Overall I think I did very well on this project!

~ Emily

Hello again! and welcome to my post on the DI Provincials. If you haven’t checked out my DI Regionals post I do suggest that, it will make things a little more clear. But in a quick summary I was in the improv team with my teammates Noah, Malaika, Jude, Anthony and Rhiann. We had just finished the regional tournament, which turned out all pretty good in my opinion, but it gave us a lot of ideas on what we could improve on for out provincial tournament. Except, there was one small problem. Since that darn virus, COVID-19 shut down all the schools, DI was also canceled. But did you really think that was going to stop our teachers!?!?! of course not! That was just a small inconvenience but of course they found a way around it. They decided we were going to do an online tournament instead.

We didn’t have that much time before the online tournament, so it was up to us to meet on our own time and come up with a plan. The first major problem we decided to work on was acting. How were we supposed to act on camera? Well, this one was actually pretty easy, we would just say lines normally in front of our cameras when it was out turn. Except, that brings us to another one of the problems we had from the last tournament, our cues. Now, our cues weren’t great, there was still lots of room to improve. To help combat this problem, we decided to use a narrator again to help bring the scene together to it wouldn’t be so confusing. We did this so that anthony, the narrator, could give obvious cues and progress the story of things were taking too long. But still the problem isn’t fixed by just by having a narrator, so we did some practice runs together on zoom calls and FaceTime calls, to help make sure we could read the cues and work on our acting. However, this brings me to our final and possibly biggest problem, the sound effects. We did have one person working on the sounds, Noah, but there was one insy problem, the sound box was at school! And because the school is closed we had to improvise, we ended up helping nomad brainstorm ideas on what we could do for sound effects, and eventually Noah had found enough things that he could work with. We did some practice with our cues and all the new sound effects, and we were actually looking pretty good!

The online event was scheduled like an actual DI tournament, each team had their team name and what time they were going to present, including their instant challenge. Eventually, it was our time to present, and it was time for all of that practice to pay off. I was actually really nervous at first, but all things went well, it went pretty smoothly, and everyone preformed well, just like we had practiced. The instant challenge also happened to be a performance challenge, and we did pretty well on that as well. In conclusion, I think we all greatly improved even though we had a bunch of challenges we had to face. I think I managed to meet the competency for this project. I’m really proud of everyone and I’m really glad we didn’t cancel!

~ Emily

Hellooooo! and welcome back to another blog post! Today I’m going to talk about DI 2020. What’s DI you ask? Well DI stands for Destination Imagination. And its pretty much a huge project/presentation. We did this last year too, and i got the same challenge too, Improv. This year was really fun. Since we all had done it before we weren’t so nervous (well we still were pretty nervous) And I had a great team! Malaika, Rhiann, Jude, Anthony, Noah and me.

The first thing we had to do was read rules of the road, which is a booklet that gives the rules of the tournaments and the challenges, then we had to read our challenge booklet where it gave our challenge debrief and the different forms we needed to complete for our challenge. Then we got into the steps: recognize, imagine, initiate and collaborate, access, and evaluate and celebrate.

Stage 1 ~ Recognize: In the recognize stage we mostly set the base of our challenge. We came up with a team name, imagined a solution, learned the power all about our challenge and the main components, and any clarify any questions we had.

Stage 2 ~ Imagine: In the imagine stage, we built on that base of stage one and started brainstorming some ideas and started signing forms like the interference form, then we also started laying out some goals for this challenge, and some things we really wanted to work on.

Stage 3 ~ Initiate and Collaborate: In the initiate and collaborate stage where we started creating our sound box and research more about for our challenge, we also finished the forms for our challenge and started rehearsing. We practice many scenes and skits.

Stage 4 ~ Access: In the access stage we looked back on our challenge details and assess what needed to get done and what had already been done, or anything that needed to get fixed.

Stage 5 ~ Evaluate and Celebrate: In the evaluate and celebrate stage, it was time to present. We were pretty lucky that the tournament was hosted at our school so our classes teams wouldn’t have had to move their props as much as other schools. The tournament was a lot of fun. I got to watch a ton of my classmates challenges as well as other schools challenges. My team’s challenge was much later in the day same with the instant challenge, but i liked it that way because it made it easy for me and my group to watch our other classmates preform. Then it was eventually awards. the awards ceremony was a lot of fun, most of our grade 9 teams placed and we were all so happy and excited, we sadly got second for our main challenge, but we definitely did really good and I’m really proud of us. But!! got first place on our instant challenge!! Which was really awesome. 2020 Destination Imagination turned out to be a great experience.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to learn about my grade 8 experience with DI here’s a link right here for you to check it out. Make sure to check out my group member’s posts as well, they did a great job and you should definitely check them out!

~ Emily