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

Recently we did a project about ethical dimensions. The driving question for that project was How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust? For this blog post, I’m going to be talking about what I think are the three most important milestones. The milestones I chose were 1, 2, and 3.

Milestone 1: The first milestone I’m going to be talking about is milestone one. What we had to do for the first milestone was we had to find an event within the last 30 years involving indigenous peoples and write a one-page paper explaining the who, what, when, where, and why. I chose the Oka Crisis. In the assignment I talked about how it started, who was effected by it, all those sorts of things. Overall I think this first milestone was an fun assignment. I enjoyed it because I find it pretty interesting to find out all about things I didn’t even know existed. It’s amazing what you can learn from the internet.

Milestone 2: The next milestone I’m going to be talking about is milestone 2. What we had to do milestone two was we got our groups (mine group was me and Angelo ). Then we had to pick a topic, we picked Big Bear. The next step was to research all about our topic. Find out as much about it as we could. I think this was a very important milestone, and plus it will be very useful in the future. It was really cool and super interesting to learn more about Big Bear and his story.

Milestone 3: The last milestone I’m going to be talking about is milestone 3. What we had to do for milestone three create our images. I really enjoyed this milestone. it was definitely my favourite. I thought it was really fun brainstorming what we were going to create and getting to actually create it. Each group had to make three images. Me and my group member, angelo, decided amongst ourselves who would make each image as well as who would write the Instagram caption for when we post it on our class Instagram.

In conclusion, this was a very interesting and fun project, and I enjoyed reading and learning about Louis Riel and Big Bear. If I were to do this project again, I probably would have worked on my time management a bit more. Now finally, the competency’s connect and understand ethical dimensions. I think I meet the competency connect because, throughout the project, I looked at the textbooks and the graphic novel we read through other points of view to help me understand how other people and I understand the texts. I think I meet the competency Understand Ethical Dimensions because I have shown my ability to decide if actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust. I showed this in the debate where the discussed if Louis Riel’s execution was just or unjust. I also showed this competency through all of the writing we did about if he was a hero or villain.
Welcome back to another blog post!

 

– Emily ✌️

Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about our most recent project in scimatics. In this project we created a Rube-Goldberg style metaphor machine. Hand crafted series and parallel circuits are built into the machine as well.

Thing we did was get a good understanding about what a Rube-Goldberg style metaphor machine was. After watching a couple videos, we we’re easy to start planning our own.

We were all put into groups of three. Each member of the group made a quick blueprint of their ideas on how they wanted to make the machine. Once everyone had done that, we looked at everyone’s blueprints and combined them together. After we decided what our metaphor machine was going to look like, we had to start getting materials and measurement.

And of course we can’t forget about our driving question now can we? The driving question for this project was “How can we represent the scientific method?” how did we answer this you ask? Well I think my group did pretty good with this and I’m proud with what we created.

– Emily✌️

So what is Confederation? Who was part of it? Why did it happen? Well this project we learnt just about that. And those questions we answered in our most recent project, Confederation Commercial. This project involved Canadian history of course, team work, and coolest of all we got to use green screens! As of every PLP project we were put into groups. My group was Owen , Liam , Ciara, and Ben. Together we created a commercial proposing the six demands of New Brunswick they needed to be met if we were going to join confederation. The most important question being asked was of course the driving question: How and why did Canada develop into a nation? As we answered this question, I learned two competencies during this.

Evidence: 

How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

Create: 

What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?

How did these colonies come together and why? Working in a group that represented a colonies beliefs and needs really helped me figure this out. New Brunswick for example which was the colony my group was given, New Brunswick wanted to join confederation because the colonies would be much stronger all together, instead of being alone, especially New Brunswick because we are just in the US border and since we are such a small colony it makes it hard for us to defend ourselves.

The colonies united together in the end because they were better together. But of course to that point was not easy. It took many conferences and a lot of negotiations to get there. We got to have our own little conference in our class to pitch all the colony’s our six proposals. This project was just one of the times I used the create competency by sharing demands using literacy skills and showing that in the commercial we made. To be able to really show the colony of New Brunswick we had to do a fair amount of research. All the research relates to the evidence competency. Another example of evidence is that when I was watching the other colonies commercials, you have to think about if they facts are indeed true and if they would come handy for your own colony.

At the end of this project I had learned how Canada became a nation through many conferences and demands and all the people who were involved and made all it happen. My class also did similar conferences and demands in this project that helped me gain an understanding of the two main competencies for this project. And I can’t forget that we also created a whole commercial explaining our proposals using a green screen. Using a green screen was something I have never learned to do. But it was much easier then I thought and was really fun. All of these things helped me make an awesome final project that I am overall pretty proud of. This project was a fun little experience that I really enjoyed.

– Emily✌️