My mPOL!!!

I’m in grade 8 so it’s my first year at high school and my first year in PLP. It’s also my first mPOL. mPOLs are what we do in PLP instead of parent teacher interviews, they are a 7 minute presentation directed by the student and presented to our teachers and parents. We make a blog post for mPOLs so here is mine. MPOL stands for mid year presentation of learning.

Humanities

An amazing example I have for humanities would be The Medium Is The Message unit. That post is here. This was definitely an amazing unit for me as I really enjoyed learning so much about advertising. Advertising is a very big thing in our modern day world and being able to understand and learn a lot about has been such a cool skill that will probably come really useful in the future. The driving questions was how can what we see hear and think influence us. I loved all the milestones and stepping stones in this project that I got to really expand my knowledge on and take my thinking further. We got to try out the advertising techniques for ourselves when we got to design ads for other companies. I got to do Ingrain in deep cove and Chalet in Oregon. We got to interview the owners, I struggled a little with this but We had prepared questions that helped. really enjoyed my group as we all worked very well together and had some really amazing ideas.

Scimatics

Our most recent unit in scimatics was my favourite unit. Scimatics mazer tag. Mazer tag blog post. For this unit we got to create a thing from Star Wars and we had to create right angle triangle laser path around it. My group created an AT-AT. Before creating the structure we did a lot of research and work on right angle triangles. We got to learn a lot about the Pythagorean theorem. My favourite part of this project was when we got to show off our finished project with dry ice at the 2019 Winter Exhibition. Exhibition 2019. Another one of my favourite units from scimatics was our Plate Tectonics unit.Plate tectonics . I really enjoy learning about our earth and the way it works. In the future I would like to study geology. I loved how far I got to think in this project and making the book was a really fun part of it. When we got to present the books that we made to the elementary school kids I was very interested with the way they thought. The questions that they had were very interesting and creative that it took me maybe about a couple of minutes to figure out the answer.

Maker

Maker has been my favourite subject. Especially our Power of The Pencil unit. Power of a pencil. I love drawing and this unit was just amazing in all. I loved learning about all the different tools in different drawing apps my favourite app is definitely Sketches. I love everything about it. My favourite milestone from the unit was the portrait. I traced over a picture that was taken in Oregon of me touching a Sea Anemone. I think that I excelled in this milestone more than others. I don’t really think I had one specific milestone that I didn’t enjoy, I loved all of them. I took the tools I learned from the unit and used them as I doodled. Right now in Maker we are working on Destination Imagination. I think my group is in a good position right now. We have a team name which is good.

PGP

We haven’t done much in PGP yet but we have done one milestone. The milestone that we did was a reflection on our amazing trip to Oregon! Oregon . Oregon was magical it was so much fun and I enjoyed every second of it. We learned a lot from it to. One example of an amazing learning experience we were given was quests. Quests got us to think out the box and really learn that the directions were there to help you not throw you off. Our group learned that in well an interesting way. On one of our quests was at our yurt camping site. We were released first and my job was to make sure no one got off track. The first clue was about a big rock and we walked all the way down this path to come to realize on the way back that the rock we were looking for was at the very start. This was really disappointing but we had to go back before our time was up, when we got back and told the teachers what had happened they were so nice and let us go back out again. We took many short cuts that we discovered the first time. At one point there was a clue about sedges. We were trying to hide from another group by being the sedges. We had to run because they were trying to follow us but running away from the other group led us to a path that led us to the end. We completed the challenge in the end. We learned a lot and grew a lot as a group from the experience. And now when we are stuck on a problem we just need to “touch the sedges, feel the sedges, BE THE SEDGES.” Or in other words think in a way we have never thought in before because it helps a lot.

I have failed in so many ways this year but that’s not a bad thing because failing is just a first attempt at learning. Being able to revise work in PLP is amazing because it helps me learn and grow. I learn more by having a growth mindset and being able to work and improve on my mistakes than just handing it in, getting a mark and never seeing it again.

My learning goal by the end of the year is to make sure I can get almost every assignment handed in on time and use the skills that I’ve learned outside of class. Not all my work has been handed in on time and the worst part is a lot of the time I’ve done it but I’ve just forgotten to hand it in. I’ve been using Things a lot more lately and it has really helped me. Even though I have learned so many amazing skills in PLP I have noticed that I have not been applying all of them outside of school. How can I use the communication skills I have learned in PLP to help me in my everyday life?

Overall I think I have improved a lot since the start of the year and I want to keep improving as the year goes on.