Hello, and thank you for returning to my blog. In today’s post, I’ll be commenting on a fascinating Learning Advance that both Grade 8 and Grade 9 students participated in. The trip took place from February 14th through February 17th. Loon Lake was the site of the advance. I’m happy for the opportunity to be a part of this advancement since I learned a lot and had a lot of fun! We also worked on finishing an eBook while on the road.

Day 1

Everyone, including myself, was ecstatic. I felt prepared and ready to pack my belongings and proceed to school, knowing that my adventure awaited me. As usual, going to class and meeting my buddies. On this particular day, I felt like I did a good job of being proactive and was pleased with the contents in my bag. It was especially lovely to see everyone thrilled to be on our way when we boarded the bus.

Before I bore you with the blog post I will insert a link to my ebook. It’s basically the shorter version of this blog post. Check it out below!

Learning Advance 2022

Click to read this book, made with Book Creator

https://read.bookcreator.com

To start off this first day, when we arrived at the lake, we started off with some activities. We went on a photo walk and to go on our walk. After this, we also completed an activity in order to get to know the area a bit. We participated in a scavenger hunt. Then, was the moment most of us had been waiting for: who was going to be in our cabins! I was very happy with my group. I was placed in one of the bigger cabins along with a bunch of my friends; Declan, Landon, Mateo, Dylan, Xander, Erik, Ben, Max and a couple others. We settled into our cabins and had a bit of free time followed by dinner in which we were able to eat some lasagna and finally ended the day with an introduction to our advisory groups, and after I went to sleep.

Day 2

When day two rolled around, I was pretty tired from the previous night. I had a fine morning fooling around with my friends in the cabin We were greeted with a delicious breakfast and also participated in our first “DI sweat box” followed by a fun activity in which we made some shelters in the forest! Lunch was great too, we ate burgers and fries. For evening fun that night I headed to the Olympic Lounge and watched some figure skating along with my friends Declan, Dana, Dylan, Ben, Colton and Max. I had a lot of fun on this day and was met with a well deserved amazing sleep.

Day 3

On day three we had a pretty exciting last full day! Of course, amazing food as always in the morning, then a PLP 9 learning block where we worked on our 7 Habits activities, followed by a delicious lunch in which we were assigned seating, then some fun learning rotations. We participated in Forest Laser tag and Battle Archery! I enjoyed the battle archery more than the forest laser tag. We got destroyed in forest laser tag by the grade 8s. After we ate some meh dinner and then I went down to the gym to play some basketball. After I got some well deserved shut eye.

Day 4

On day four, we had breakfast and then packed up our stuff. This was followed by an exciting game of capture the flag! It was grade 8’s vs grade 9s. I had a lot of fun because I was able to goof around and get competitive. It felt like I was in elementary school again and I had a great time- probably one of the biggest highlights of the trip honestly. After lunch we went on a bus and went home. I was exhausted I walked home and went to sleep for the rest of the day. 

Thats all I hope you enjoyed this blog post. Until next time. 

Hello everyone over the past couple of weeks we have been busy creating 2 iMovies which were about ionic and covalent bonding in atoms, the goal was to show the steps of the bonding process between ionic and covalent atoms/bonds. Some of the building knowledge aspects of this project included:

-Work books/textbooks that explain many of the important elements that go into making the bonding form

-Project start mind map that included questions and a few things that we already knew about the subject

-The task of gaining the knowledge to choose both an ionic compound and a covalent

The biggest differences between ionic and covalent bonding is that an ionic compound is formed between two non metals and a covalent compound is formed between one non metal and a metal. I used this information in order to identify one of each compound that I would go on to put into my animation.

The compounds that I chose were:

• Sodium Chloride (NaCL) Sodium chloride is formed when sodium atoms interact with chlorine atoms. When this occurs, sodium will donate an electron (which is a negatively-charged particle) to chlorine. This makes sodium slightly positive and chlorine slightly negative it is my ionic
• Phosphorus trichloride (PC3I) is prepared industrially by the reaction of chlorine with white phosphorus, using phosphorus trichloride as the solvent.

After I had chosen my compounds I made a storyboard, which was basically a non animated rough draft of the animation I would eventually make. In order to represent the compounds in my story, I drew Bohr models of each one that I could then put into my story with speech bubbles to represent that they could communicate.

The actual video and slides took up most of the time and was the most difficult part. I created the slides in keynote then moved them into iMovie where I then added the voice lines from voice memos. It took a rlly long time to match all of the voice lines up with the video but I Mabel to complete it.

I’m happy with how it turned out and am proud of the animation and what I learned from this project.

Hello everyone, welcome to my mPol blog post. This is my first year as a PLP student and this is my first mPol blog. In this blog post I will be reflecting on my growth as a learner these past couple of months. This post will be based around my past projects but also to answer these driving questions:

“How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?”

“How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?”

I have done quite a bit of projects this past half year and I will be using these projects to demonstrate my learning and to show you my growth as a PLP student. Over the past half school year I would say only 2 projects really stood out from the rest of all of the other projects that I was tasked with completing. The exponent board game in Scimatics and the Revolutions on trial project for English.

Humanities

Throughout Humanities we have completed three projects in total. These three project’s are:

-People and the environment

-Working with words

-Revolutions on trial

All of these projects were fun to take part of But there was one project which really stood out to me, “Revolutions on trial.” In this project I learned about the Haitian revolution among others but more importantly I learned how to develop skills that I didn’t know I could’ve learned/developed. Throughout this project and english in general I know that I have developed and exercised skills to make me a better learner and classmate.

Some of the skills I used in this project are:

-Communicating: I talked to my other classmates, I listened to them and told them my ideas

-Critical thinking: I listened to other peoples ideas to ultimately contributed to help combine them to create one final product.

-Responsibility: I was responsible for what I was tasked with completing and I finished everything I was told to finish.

My fails in English

I would say one area I definitely needed to work on would be the most recent project we did which was Working with words. The reason why I think that I could’ve improved upon that project is because I’m pretty terrible at making poems.

What can I change to build upon my Fail’s?

I think I need to get more inspiration and have a more open mind when trying to create the poems. If i need help I can always ask for help from a teacher or parent which I don’t usually do. I think that would help tremendously with my understanding of a project or certain task that I’m given.

My experience with this class

The most interesting and least interesting project/product:

The one product I found most interesting was the e book. I’m sill working on it. I enjoy poetry a lot and with the e book I can express myself through poetry.

One project that I found to be the least interesting would be the commonlit stories and activities, I enjoyed every project but that project wasn’t as interesting to me compared to the other two.

Scimatics

In Scimatics I have worked on a couple of projects throughout that class. The names of the projects that we worked on are “Game of exponent laws”, “Correlation vs. Causation”, and Chemistry stories. I feel that the project I could’ve definitely worked on would be “Correlation vs. Causation, and “Chemistry stories”. The reason why I feel like I could’ve improved upon those projects is because in both of those projects we had to do animating which I suck at given my lack of knowledge with animating.

My most favourite project that I made in Scimatics was the board game. It was the first project I made.  It helped with my communication, responsibility and other key skills that I learned while making the board game. Plus I had a lot of fun making it!

My fail’s in Scimatics

I dont understand some of the tasks that I am given and I dont ask for help which in turn confused me. When I get confused I think that I have to do one task a certain way even though I am supposed to do it the complete opposite way. Another thing I can improve on is getting better on animating, that’s something I like doing, it’s something that I find entertaining. One way I think I can improve upon that would be to make more animations, get comfortable with what I’m doing and try something bigger.

What can I change to build upon my FAIL’s?

I will ask for help when I need it, so I can understand the concepts a better. I can do more homework and put in more effort in my work and projects.

Driving Questions

How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?

-I have demonstrated my growth as a learner through the application of curricular competencies into my learning.

How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?

I will understand what point I’m at and set realistic goals that I feel take in account of where I am as a learner now and where I want to be.

-I think I will be able to achieve my learning plan this year.

-I think this is the most important this is the core competency that I feel I understand, but there are still aspects that I need to improve

-Within the communication core I feel like my biggest strength is communicating to an audience in expressive ways

What I need to improve: I need to communicate and incorporate other’s idea’s into team based work. As well as clearly communicating my own idea’s to others.

Driving Questions

How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?

-I have demonstrated my growth as a learner through the application of curricular competencies into my learning.

How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?

-I will understand what point I’m at and set realistic goals that I feel take in account of where I am as a learner now and where I want to be.

-I think I will be able to achieve my learning plan this year.

Hello everyone Ewan here,

*Some catchy intro* This project was all about revolutions, trials, and debates. Without further ado lets die right in!

At the start of the project we started reading a book that was is called Animal farm by George Orwell. At the same time as reading this, we studied Crane Brintons diagram of a revolution. Crane Brinton was a historian who theorized and studied revolutions. His diagram was an in-depth look at how a revolution starts, grows, and dies. Animal Farm and Crane Brintons theory went together perfectly because Animal Farm follows the structure of Craine Brinton’s theory perfectly. We would then meet in groups after reading each chapter to discuss and analyze the events. It is a short book ( 10 chapters ) so it didn’t take long to finish I think it took a week or two to finish.

Around halfway through the project our teachers put us into the “Nation X” trial. The class was split into half, one half of the class stayed in the main classroom and the other half of the class which I was in went into the annex room. My teacher Mr. Harris split the class into social classes, the king and his nobles, the police officers who put anyone who acted out in jail and the two lower class groups which was the newspaper group. The jobs the citizens had to do in the newspaper group was they had to write about how great the king was even though he wasn’t. The last social class was the grocery group, in that group they sold candy for a profit. I was put into the newspaper group, we got paid 1 dollar a day for our labour but we had to pay one dollar for taxes which contradicted itself. Soon after, I went off to sell some *not school appropriate* for extra profit. For the first couple of days everything was tame and no one was acting out. On the third day some of the people from the lower class groups started a revolution against the king because their pay wasn’t enough to make any profit because the taxes were to high. On the third night all of the lower class citizens (including me) went to revolt against the king and his nobles. While everyone was revolting I sneakily went over the border and took all of the tax money which was over 70 DOLLARS! The surprising thing is that no one noticed that I did it. After “borrowing” the governments money my group and I were richer than the government along with all of the other groups. The government couldn’t stop all of us and agreed to raise our pay by a couple of dollars. On the 4th day a terrible virus swept through  the Nation X simulation and devastated the entire population thankfully the government created a vaccine on the 5th day and cured everyone. On the fifth day some of the people from the lower classes requested that they would have a discussion with the government to create a more fair and functional society which they did but the time for the Nation X simulation ran out. I think the teachers made the simulation unfair for the common people so they would start a revolution and follow Craine Brinton’s theory exactly.

When we finished reading Animal Farm, we wrote a three-paragraph essay that explains Animal Farm and how it connects to Crane Brintons theory and structure of a revolution. This demonstrates one of the curricular competencies, connecting. By using evidence from Animal Farm and other sources, I was able to refine my understanding of what I have read and demonstrate it in my three-paragraph essay.

For our final project, the one all the work had been leading up to was a debate about if the revolution we were given was effective or ineffective for the country itself and for the people who lived and still live there to this day. There were 4 revolutions you could have been assigned to, French, American, Haitian, or Xinhai. On both the prosecution and defence, there was a team of lawyers plus one person who would represent a witness, a historical figure who would present their personal recount of the events that were being argued at the court case. My group included Teva, Nolan, Xander, Gabbi/Mickey, and we were given the Haitian revolution to debate on why the revolution was effective. The other team which included Frazer, Luca, Faith, Alfie and Julian were given the same revolution except they had to make a debate on why the revolution was ineffective for the country and its people.

Preparing for the court cases was no easy task. It was a mess getting all the information together and organizing with the opposing team, who needed to know our script, witnesses, affidavits, and any additional information they may have needed. HaitianMockTrialScript_Dec0721

I myself was a lawyer for the defence team of Haiti. As a lawyer, it was my job to ask the witness question about the Haitian revolution. My understanding of the lawyer I was portraying demonstrates my knowledge of continuity and change, one of the curricular competencies. I brought a script because I would have not remembered any of my lines because I have a very terrible memory.

As for the actual court case itself, my team and I presented it in the Vortex threader at the winter exhibition. Each case lasted around 20 minutes each. We had to present in front of our family members who came to our play at the designated time. When it wasn’t my performance time, I directed people down the stairway to the theatre. I waited backstage in the green room before my debate, and I saw the rest of the exhibition. Overall, it was a pretty great night. I was super nervous about presenting in front of all of the parents but as soon as I started talking those nervous feelings melted away.

To wrap up this blog post, I need to answer the driving question, which is “How might we as legal teams determine the effectiveness of a revolution?” In short the only way to determine if a major historical event was or is ever relevant is either by throughly studying one, like we did in this project, or choosing to study historical events for a living. Even after this project, I’m certain there are things about the Haitian revolution I still don’t know about; perhaps in this project all I truly did was skim the top of the revolutionary iceberg. Even so, I still feel as if I can honestly answer the driving question with this: We can determine the effectiveness of any major historical event with hard evidence, and thorough research into all areas of whatever historical event, no matter how obscure.

What is the difference between causation and correlation?

Correlation

Positive correlation: A positive correlation would be 1. This means the two variables moved either up or down in the same direction together.
Negative correlation: A negative correlation is -1. This means the two variables moved in opposite directions.
Zero or no correlation: A correlation of zero means there is no relationship between the two variables. In other words, as one variable moves one way, the other moved in another unrelated direction.

Causation

Causation is when one variable causes a change in another variable. For example, the number of advertisements a company runs directly impacts consumers’ brand awareness of that company.

There were a lot of aspects of this project, mainly the project was about surveys, graphs, and correlation vs causation. I thoroughly enjoyed the correlation and causation project, it had many challenging problems which was fun. The outcome of the presentation wasn’t what I wanted but I still had fun with this.

We were given the challenge of trying to survey as many people as possible with 2 questions for each survey my team and I made. In total we did 2 surveys which was 4 questions in total. With the information we received from the surveys we then had to try to correlate the questions, put them into graphs and finally put them into keynote for the end project. The first survey we did was trying to correlate swimming and cramps. The first question was “What is your swimming ability from 1-10?” The second question was “On a scale of 1-10 how often do you think you would get cramps swimming in a one hour period?” For the second survey we tried to correlate hours spent on your devices and how much sleep you get. The first question we made was How many hours do you spend on devices a day? The second question was “How many hours of sleep do you get each night?”

Presentation 21

Landon, Cole and I created a QR code with the link that went straight to our survey. We went around the entire school taping the printed QR codes onto everything to increase the chances of getting someone to fill out our survey. We made the survey on google forms because it’s the only survey app that I know of and because it’s really simple to use.

My team and I found tried to find the correlation and causation in both of our survey graphs but sadly our questions didn’t fit the outcome we wanted. In graph one we correlated swimming and cramps. In the second graph we correlated the amount of hours on devices and the amount of hours spent on how much you sleep. For the first survey we got a negative correlation with trying to correlate swimming and cramps. For the second graph we tried to find the causation for the amount of hours spent on devices and the amount of hours spent sleeping. We thought that if you spent more time on your devices you would have less sleep but it was not the case.

Curricular Competencies

The first competency for this project is Planning and conducting. This competency is about using proper equipment to correctly collect and record data. We achieved this in our survey, as our questions were clear, we used the proper software to make the survey and our questions had little bias.

The second competency is Communicating and Representing. This competency is about using mathematical vocabulary to contribute to mathematical discussions. We used this competency in our presentation when we had to explain the causation between Swimming and cramps. We applied the same competency for our second presentation on the amount of hours you sleep and how many hours you are on your devices.

The last competency is Applying and Innovating. For this project, that meant following good ethics while conducting our surveys. My team and I achieved this in our survey because none of our questions involved any sensitive topics people might not feel comfortable asking.

Hello dear reader, today we finished our “People and the Environment” project. This project was mainly based around how people and the environment effect each other. This entire project was really fun. I am quite pleased with how the final product turned out, I don’t think I would change anything that I did. All in all this project was a great success. Now without further ado lets dive right in!

On day one of this project we started talking about how people and the environment effect each other. The first couple of days were revision and reading commonLit stories. Now the question you must be asking yourself is “What is CommonLit?” Well let me tell you! CommonLit is a free digital tool that teachers use to put reading and writing projects on the site for the students to complete. Some o the stories we read were Lee Sherman and the toxic Louisiana bayou written by Arlie Hochschild, Hey come on out by Shinichi Hoshi and many more. The CommonLit stories were my favourite part of this entire project. My two favourite stories out of the eight stories we read are Hey come on out and Lee Sherman. I love these stories because they have a good premise and are full of suspense, which are two very important qualities a story needs to have in my opinion of course.

We were told that at the end of the project we had to write a letter about a pollution problem and an idea on how we can fix it. I picked ocean plastics. I spent 2 and a half hours of research on ways I could fix it and I came up with using an alternative for using single use plastics, I figured out we can use Cornstarch plastic. Cornstarch acts just like plastic but it is made out of cornstarch and it is biodegradable in the right weather conditions. The plastic can degrade in warm humid places which is a perfect fit for Vancouver (especially in the summer.) Our teacher Mrs. Maxwell told us that we had to send our finished letter to a politician or person of power of our choice in British Colombia. I chose Terry beech, the reason for that is because he holds a lot of power in the North Vancouver district. We had to make letter drafts before we could create our finished letter. The pictures below are my rough drafts for my letter.

This is the first blog post of grade 9! It’s good to be here in this new school. Over the past month i have been working on an exponents board game in scimatics with Judah and Alfie. It was quite fun, we learned about exponent laws, and how to incorporate exponent laws into our board game. 

Rules

Rules

-2-4 players

-The youngest player goes first

-After the first players turn is done move around the game board in a clockwise pattern

-There are 2 3 sided die, one die is black and the other die is red

-The red coloured die is the exponent and the blue coloured die is the base

-Each player starts with 2 health points and 0 shield points

-Shield points can protect you from losing health points

-If the player loses all health points they are sent back to the start of the game and all of their bonuses, health, shield points are reset

-If all of the cards in the deck are used, one player has to re-shuffle the cards in the deck and put them back

-There will be a “answer guru” who has all of the answer cards, the answer guru doesn’t play the game only deals the answer cards to the players!

-All of the answers are on the answer cards!

-Answer cards will have the equation on the top and the answer will be on the under side of the card!

-Can’t take back an answer!

Characters/Enemies

-If the player draws the Camo Skylander card they gain one shield point

-If the player draws the lego Indiana jones card they are given a health point if the base from their previous turn is even, if the base from their previous is odd they lose a health point

-If the player draws the dream face mask card, they are given a dream mask and can avoid the next negative character they encounter (can only be used once, cannot be used on final boss)

-If the player draws the fairy god mother card everyone is effected by the fairy godmother. If the fairy godmother card is pulled from the deck, everyone roles a different base (the blue die) but they have the same exponent (3) (red die) All players move back the number of their answer. There is only one fairy godmother card in the deck

How to play

-Each player has one turn to roll the black and red die. Whatever number the players roll they have answer the question, (Ex, Jared rolls a 3 from the black die and a 2 from the red die, he has to answer 3 to the power of 2. If he gets the question right he moves the same number of spaces as the answer. If Jared gets the question wrong he moves back 3 spaces.)

-Repeat this rule until the players get to the final boss

Final boss

-The final boss is a dragon

-The player(s) can start fighting the dragon once they get to the final room

-The dragon has 80 health 

-Whatever number the player(s) roll they have answer the exponent question and if they get the question right, that is the amount of damage they do to the dragon (Ex Elizabeth rolls 3 to the power of 2 which is 9, in turn she does 9 damage to the dragon

-If the player(s) roll any number to the power of the same number the damage is doubled (ex Jasper rolls 2 to the power of 2 the damage is doubled, which is 8.

-If the player(s) gets the question wrong the dragon deals one hit point of damage to the player

-If the dragon kills the player(s) they get sent back to the start of the game

How to win

-The player to land the killing hit on the dragon wins the game all other players lose

Making the rules of the board game was quite a task I must say, actually making the game in general took a very long time. In the end the game didn’t turn out as well as we hoped but the process was fun and i got to make new friends.