If you may remember from last year, each year in PLP the students present two student led conferences. These are referred to as the mPOLs, mid-year presentation of learning, and the tPOLs, transition presentation of learning. It is now time for the mPOL. This year it’s going to be a little different however since we now have a new class called PGP.

 

PGP is a class all about goal setting, time management, and basically just how to win at life. At first I was somewhat skeptical of this since I have done a lot of goal setting however now it has proven very useful to me and I already feel much more on top of everything. For the first term in PGP we talked about the grades we wanted for each class and what we would do to earn that. For the second term things got a little bit more intense. We had to read a book called “What do I really Want” and then complete the forms and little activities inside. As well as writing a weekly review about our successes and failures. Something very cool about this was that we did it all in a journal. Even though this program primarily uses the iPad, all of our weekly reviews, forms, and activities were done in the journal. Below is my dream board, some of my dreams/hopes for the future.

 

Now that I’ve given a brief explanation as to what PGP it is time for me to reflect. There are three main things I want to talk about and those are times where I’ve impressed myself and been proud of what I accomplished, successes. Times where I could’ve done more and how I grew from that, growth. Then finally I want to talk about some goals I set for myself.

 

Successes

So far this year we have done lots of projects, blog posts, and activities, and I’m happy to say that I feel like I’ve contributed a lot into all of them. However one of the projects that really sticks out to me is the chemical stories project. In this project I proved to myself that I could do more than I thought. Whether that meant animating a short film in less than a week, or coming up with ways to include group members that weren’t there, or even transforming a room with three people in less than a day. I think this project taught me a lot about being creative. I tend to stick on the more technical side when it comes to my work, so it was cool for me to see myself writing stories and creating this imaginary world. Another big thing I see as a success for me was the Student Blogging Challenge. Before this I always saw my blog as just kind of a boring place with essays. Once we started the blogging challenge I immediately started wanting to make my blog fun and reflect myself. So I gave myself a brand new theme, re did my about me page and made a video for it, started writing non required blog posts about things in my life, and so much more. I honestly think this challenge was so good for me. Before doing this I didn’t feel like I was very motivated to do any work, but this helped me start up again. I now feel me and my personality really show through on my blog.

 

Growth

As fun as it is to reflect and talk about things we did well, it is also very important to reflect on things that didn’t go well. This is so you can analyze why they didn’t go well and how you can grow from that. So far this year I have been pretty proud of everything and don’t really have any failures to share but one thing I will mention is that since the beginning of the year my blog posts have become so much better. I remember the first few blog posts I wrote this year all the feedback I got told to me reflect in the process, not just explain what we learned about. I was telling the story of what we did rather than what I learned and how its useful. I now make sure to be much more reflective and I can tell the teachers have picked up on that. Multiple times now they’ve commented on my blogs in Showbie telling me how it was a good reflection. I’m very happy to have grown in this way because this is something very useful for any type of future I want to have.

Goals

The first goal I set for myself is to read more. When I was younger reading was my favourite thing to do, however I started to lose interest and since grade 5 I haven’t really read a book for pleasure. About the only time I read now is when its a novel study assigned

LubosHouska / Pixabay

book, and even sometimes I have trouble finishing those ones. Because I haven’t read very much I have gotten worse at it and that annoys me. So my goal is basically to get reading back into a routine and read for enjoyment. I have already time blocked an hour and a half before bed every 3 days to read. There are no specifics, but if I can just get myself into the habit of reading before bed then that is a success. Then from that point I will continue to grow and read even more. Another goal I have is to continue the weekly reviews even when they aren’t required anymore. This is because over the winter holidays I didn’t do any because I forgot so I have only done two, but since I’ve done them I’ve felt so much lighter. It’s nice to have something that you can look at and just go “wow, I did that, I’m proud of myself”. It just feels good and so when your starting a new week and it’s Monday and your tired and don’t want to do anything you can just look at your weekly review and get a burst of energy.

 

So far Grade 9 has been a really great year for me and I can’t wait to continue growing and learning in the second half of the year.