“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.”

Introduction

This is my 3rd presentation of leaning since I stated high school. As I look back there is so much to reflect on, this goes from everything I learnt, the challenged I’ve overcome, and the skills I’ve further developed. Enjoy!

How Far I’ve Come

Grade 9 has been a massive year in growth for me, making mistakes has helped me grow in many different ways to become the proud learner I am now. When I look back at how scared I was to finally be going into grade 9 I would have never thought I would be where I am now. I am so grateful that I am in PLP because without it, my grade 9 year so far, would be completely different. Looking back to the grade 8/9 summer, I remember being really anxious about grade 9 and thinking it was this massive obstacle that would be difficult to overcome. To me, it didn’t seem right that I was already in grade 9. So, now that I look back, I am starting to realize that the fear and anxiety I had to be in grade 9 is actually what gave me the motivation and drive to be the best I could this year. In my head I thought it was going to be very difficult and scary so I irked hard to surround myself with the right people and role models to make sure I was going to succeed. Now that you know how I felt at the beginning of the year, compared to now, I am going to talk more about the in between and the projects that I failed in and succeeded in.

 

What Project Was I Least Proud of And Why?

This year has been filled with countless projects, and I feel I did differently on each one but there is one project that stands out to me as the one I am least proud of, but has helped me the most, and that is the Frankenstuffie Project. This project took place recently, from the end of winter break to the beginning of spring break. This project started with us taking apart 3 stuffies to make a  frankenstuffie, I think I did good with that but where things really started to fall apart for me was when we had to read a book called leviathan, I was constantly falling behind, and unable to really keep up and understand how it even related to our project. I didn’t even end up finishing the book and did just alright on the mini tests we had every 10 chapters. I think that this really served as a wake up call to me, telling me I have to pay more attention to what we are doing and spend less time goofing around. The biggest lesson I think I learned in relation to falling behind in the book was that it had a greater impact over time. For example, If I’m only reading 5 chapters a week and we are supposed to be reading 10, It may seem alright at first but over the span of a few weeks all of a sudden I am really behind and this can apply to basically everything else in life, If you stay on track, you wont fall behind.

Later on in the project we had to make a backstory for our stuffy and eventually make a video, I think I did really well with the backstory but didn’t really think about how easy it would be to put into a video, in the end I think the video was a learning experience in its self, but I think I could have done better, I made a blog post reflection on this project that I will link below. Now that I have talked about where I think I “Failed”, I will now talk about where I think I did my best.

What Project am I Most Proud of?

The project I am most proud of has got to be the Metaphor Machines project. The project was so rich in information and history which was perfect for me cause that is my favourite thing to learn about. Not only was what we were learning about right up until my alley, but we also got to present it in the most interesting way at the Winter Exhibition. The project started with us learning about some basic history and some basic metaphors. After getting a handle on what we were learning about, we all had to pick a revolution to study and use for our final presentation which I will talk more about later. I choose the Irish Revolution, also known as Easter Rising since it took place on Easter. I was put in a group with 7 other classmates, We all spent time studying the history of the revolution individually and then working together and sharing what we all learned. The final presentation at the exhibition was going to be a giant Rube Goldberg Machine, the size of a wall. We were all so exited and got straight to work. I remember there being the perfect balance between fun and work. I also think teamwork was something we all built on since we needed 7 people working hard together to build the machine. We had maybe a month to work on the machine before the exhibition and that was my favourite month of the entire school year just because of how much it fit my learning styling and how well my team and I worked together. We were a little bit behind my the time the exhibition was near but we all worked together to get it done just in time.

 

The exhibition itself went amazing, our machine surprisingly worked quite well and everyone did their part to make sure we had a nice stand for the parents to come and visit. We served food and each had a part to talk about when the machine was working. But, how does the machine connect to the Irish Revolution, Every person, had a section in the machine which was a metaphor for that section of the revolution timeline and for more information on that you can read my blog post on that project. So what did I take away from this project. I think the biggest skill I built on here, was teamwork, but there are many others such as, communication, leadership, consistency, construction, and so much more. Now that I’ve talked about my best and worst project, lets see how they compare to the expectations I set myself at the beginning of the year on my learning plan.

My Learning Plan

At the beginning of the school year everybody made a learning plan basically explaining your expectations for yourself for the rest of the school year. In my Learning Plan I talked a lot about my struggles and where I could grow on depending on the subject. There were categories including preparation, self-regulation, engagement, and more. I wanted to mainly improve on already existing skills but also create and start to master some new ones. I wanted to try and get proficient in all my classes which I think I achieved well. I am also think about my grade on what I think I should have got in my head not just on paper. 

Conclusion 

Over this year I have had plenty of ups and downs in my growth and learning level but in the end everything I have gone through this year has made me the learner I am today. And with that, thank you for reading my MPOL for grade 9.

Thank You!