Who am I? This is a question that we should all keep asking ourselves and what better way to do that then with a project.
First of all, I am not the most qualified person to be giving advice on this because the question “Who am I?” Is one that I’ve been struggling to answer for a long time. Throughout this project I did however start taking the right steps to answering this.
A big thing that helped me in answering this was reading a book about someone inspirational, in my case the Trevor Noah Born A Crime, and analyzing it. I found it especially inspirational because he came from really harsh beginnings and still was always able to make light of a situation and make the best with what he had. The book was full of quotes that I was able to relate to, but my favourite one has to be “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice that I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most.”
Similarly to the book, interviewing a person that was inspirational to me helped me reflect on who I am. I decided to interview my grandpa because, growing up, he was always someone who stayed positive. Even after he developed Alzheimer’s he stayed positive and continues to tell the stories of him growing up because those are the ones that are permanently engraved in his mind. He has a lot of stories that I can relate to and use to reflect on my own life.
So when it comes down to it, who am I? This is something that I’m going to continue to work on answering everyday because who I am will always build up. To simplify it, I am the combination of past experiences, role models, lessons, and challenges that I have faced and experienced.
Hi and welcome back to my blog! We just finished up with our Winter Exhibition, and it was an eventful process. We were focusing on the art of apology and how they are kept alive through memorials. This was all to get to the final product of, as I mentioned earlier, the exhibition where guests got the chance to vote on their favourite memorial model that we built. The driving question for this project that kept us going was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered, and not repeated, today?”
At the start of this project we were separated into three different groups with three different subgroups, all at random. The three main groups were the groups that were officially apologized to by the Canadian government due to discriminatory laws from the past. These groups were the Japanese Canadians, the Chinese Canadians, and the Sikh Canadians. I was put into one of the three the Japanese Canadian groups with Silas, Jasper, and Callum. Once grouped, the research began. Between individual research and class lessons from Mr. Hughes, I had pages of useful notes that helped me throughout the project. If you want to skim through them you can here.
Armed with more notes and new knowledge that I knew what to do with, we began work on our memorial model. Our group decided to build a fishing boat that had the words Property of Japanese Canadians with the word Japanese crossed out. This was to represent how Canada stole all the Japanese Canadians possessions and sent them to internment camps. At our table we also had an interactive slideshow, a poster with a timeline, an informational slideshow playing in the background, and a trivia game where people could win prizes. Overall, I think our station turned out very well, with us also doing very well in the voting.
So, how can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered, and not repeated, today? Well as we learned there are many ways to keep a memory alive. Weather it’s through storytelling or a memorial, as long as people are seeing and/or hearing about it often they are bound to think about it. Part of the memorial was determining where it would be placed, which is a vital part because the more people that just happen to pass it in their everyday life, the more people that might stop and read about it and think about it.
Hi and welcome back to another blog post! The last project that I just finished working on was called Saving Juno Beach. It was a project about World War 2, specifically Canada’s contributions, with the end product being as essay.
After learning about WW2 and different ways that Canada contributed, the next step to the final product was the brainstorming/starting the research.This is the step where we wrote down all the information that we found relevent to the topic of Canada’s involvement in WW2 and started sorting it out as well as starting to look into more details. I organized mine so that there were the 3 clear topics for my body paragraphs with different subsections that have even more information coming off them. I found that this was the best way of doing it because it made it really easy once I actually started the body paragraphs since I could just reword it and I more or less had them.
Once my final essay was done, I got feedback and was able to make revisions. My feedback didn’t have any major issues, just minor things that were definitely easy fixes. Once I made those changes I had my completed essay, which you can view here.
If I were to do this project again, there are a few things that I would have done differently. The main thing would have been to have finished my first essay draft sooner so that I would have been able to get more feedback. Like I mentioned earlier, the feedback was nothing major but I think a second set of eyes would have caught any more mistakes and other things that needed to be changed.
Hi, and welcome back to my blog! I’ve recently finished our first humanities project, and this was an interesting one. This project was all based around the the idea of how the geography of the West has shaped us. To start off the project and to see this all first hand, we went on a road trip through BC and into Alberta. On top of the amazing places that we got to see first hand and the things we learned about geography on the trip, we also did a lot of work in class to continue bettering our understandings of more historical features. The driving question for this project was done a little differently then normal. For this project, we were able to pick an aspect of how the West has shaped us, those aspects being people, economy, and history, and use that to create our own variation of a driving question to work with. In the end I decided to focus on the more economic side of it and created my driving question, “How has thegeography of the West shaped us economically?”
As I already mentioned, we started this all off with a learning advance road trip. This learning advance was separated into two groups, with me being in the first. I go into a lot more detail about most of the place that we went to in the book, I’ll link that in later on, so I’ll just talk about some of the highlights that weren’t mentioned. One place that was very memorable that I wasn’t able to really touch on in the book was the painted warriors ranch that we went to. This is where we learned about First Nation culture through archery. It was a very fun and interesting experience, especially when we were sent off to shoot at foam animal targets. It really reminded me of when I as little and I would go to my grandparents house, who had a bow and arrow, and set up targets. Another very memorable place that we went to was lake Louise. This was amazing blue lake that had a walk around it and the massive Chateau Lake Louise on the water. On top of it’s beauty, it was amazing because of it’s details that not everyone knows, for example the fact that the Chateau Lake Louise was a big tourist attraction when the CPR was fairly new, or that Lake Louise is one of the most photographed lakes in the world.
The book that we made was the big thing that we were working towards from the start. When we launched the project, we were given the book template so we’d be able to know what the major parts that we’d have to take notes on while away on the learning advance. From there we were given a bit more free reign, within certain limits, to add what we thought was necessary to the book. The biggest thing we were required to do within the book is give examples of our answer to the driving question at every chance we got. I think that I gave some good answers to the question, you can see my main answer on pages 6-7. The one thing that I wish I had done better with in my book was the layout. I found myself focusing more on the information that I was putting into it, which lead me to having something that wasn’t as visually appealing as it could’ve been. To showcase our books, we had a mini exhibition where we were split into rooms depending on what aspect of the driving question we chose to answer, people, economy, and history, meaning I was with the other economy people. We then had family come in to see my, and other student’s, work. I think that I did a good job with presenting my work in a way that answered any questions and gave a lot of information, without being too long and boring.
Something that I was really abbe to take away from this project is questioning. I’m always a fairly curious person that will try and answer my own questions and I think that really showed while I was away on the learning advance. If there was something that I wanted to know, I would break down the question into more specific, easier to answer question that I would use personal connections and what was in front of me to answer. I would then use those partial answers that I had and answer my main one. I was definitely able to do that a lot over the course of the learning advance, and I think that it really enhanced my work.
So to answer the driving question, how has the geography of the West shaped us economically? While, like I was saying throughout the book, the geography of the West has shaped us by allowing us to have a thriving economy with multiple industries that have helped us to settle and develop. Because of our economic vastness, we will always have things to fall back on if one of these industries were to fail, while many other places don’t have that luxury. A good example of the West being able to fall back on its many economic factors is what happened when Covid hit. A lot of these industries were shut down and many places took massive hits to their economies due to this while the west still had a economy that was working. We were definitely still impacted, but we were able to keep going fairly strong.
Hi, and welcome to my tPOL. Before I begin, I must make the tPOL declaration. 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.
Halfway through the year, I did my mPOL. The mPOL was a reflection on my work throughout the first half of the year, while the tPOL is me explaining why I am ready to move onto grade 9. Throughout my tPOL, I’m going to be going through my different PLP classes this semester, scimatics and humanities, and pulling some examples from them to show why I should move onto grade 9.
Humanities
Humanities is a subject that isn’t really my strong suit. I tend to especially struggle with history, which wasn’t the best since we had all of our projects that were almost entirely based around history. The projects that we had for humanities this semester were The Renaissance, Argh Matey, and New Beginnings. All of these projects had different thing that went good or bad with them, or even just had things that I FAILed in.
Out of these projects, I think that my FAILs are the most important things that happened. If you didn’t already know, in PLP FAIL stands for First Attempt In Learning. The reason that my FAILs are important is because mistakes can help you learn. If you do something wrong or poorly, you can take criticism and learn how to improve it. I feel that taking, and using, criticism is something that I do very well. The best example of me FAILing in these projects is the seycove advertisement that we did at the start of the New Beginnings. It was something that we were doing to see what we remembered from past projects about photography, editing, and layout. In my first attempt at it, I forgot about all of the things that I had learned in the past, making it look terrible. I took some feedback from some of my classmates and my teachers then started making changes. The feedback that I was given, allowed me to make my second version much better.
The other humanities project that I’m going to talk about is the argh matey project. This project had good examples of things that I did good in and things that I could have done better. The main thing that I think I really did good with in this project was getting things done efficiently. I feel that all my class time was used very well and, when we were filming at cates park, I was able to finish the project. The thing that I definitely could have improved on was my story for it. I had a bit of trouble with making the story enjoyable and have all the necessary information. I do think that I could have made my story a bit better if I had put a little more time into the actual writing of it and not all my time into the research.
Scimatics
For this semester, with scimatics being a lot more focused on the science aspect of it all, I had to push myself a bit more then normal. The reason that I say this is because I tend to understand math a bit more then I do science, but I do think that I was able to still do a pretty good job understanding the science this time around. The projects that I had for scimatics this semester were Chemistry Coding, Ultimate Design Challenge, and Comic Cells.
Out of these three projects, the Ultimate Design Challenge was the only one that was mainly math, it was also the one that I think I did the best in. A big part of the final result of this project, the presentation that we gave to the class about our design, was the calculations. For most of the shapes, we were given the formulas for surface area and volume, or we could just look them up, but I changed myself by doing shapes that didn’t really have a set formula, meaning that I had to figure them out. It was a fairly hard and tedious process, with a few FAIL moments, but I was able to do it in the end. I think that the whole process of that showed that I am a very persistent, and stubborn, person that will always do my best to follow through with things that I’ve committed to, in school and personally.
The Chemistry Coding project is the last scimatics project that I’m going to talk about because I feel that it really showed who I am as a learner. The first reason that I say this is because, like I was saying with the Ultimate Design Challenge project, I was really trying to challenge myself and see it through. We had to code a game in this project, and I was trying to do something a bit more complex, so I was using tutorials and videos and even other students to help me with making it work. It also definitely showed my ability to take and use feedback. I was continuously making changes and getting feedback/ideas from others.
In the end, I have really learned a lot about myself as a learner this past year. I think that, in this semester especially, I’ve really started shaping into the learner that I want to be. I do still think that there are things that I need to change if I really want to become that learner. The biggest change I’d need to make being my ability to use time more efficiently because, I know I’ve said this a lot in the past, but I always struggle with procrastinating and staying on topic, making my work not always as good as I want it to be. With that said, I do think that I did better with that every once in a while and that, with time, I can become a lot better with it.
Welcome to another blog! This project was an important one because it is my last humanities project of the year. In this project we focused on New France and photography. There were a few main things that we had to do in this project, like photography practice/editing practice, an advertisement for seycove, research, a trade simulation, and of course the final project. This was all to answer the driving question, “What did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved”.
The first thing that we had to do in this project was make an ad for seycove. This was to see what we remembered about photography, editing, and layout. I worked with Luca and Francis to make a first draft that didn’t turnout at all how we hoped. We then all went away and came back with our own versions of the ad. I think that our individual ads turned out a lot better, mainly because we had more time then what we had with the group ad.
The next step for this project was to practice our photography skills. For this we went on a nature walk and we would stop every once in a while to take some pictures. This definitely helped with reminding me on past things that we learned about photography, such as perspective, rule of thirds, and leading lines.
This was one project that required a bit more research then some of the other ones. For the main part of the research, I was focusing on the thing that I was going to be doing the final project on, the Coureurs des Bois. I had three different sources, each with a few different notes from that source. In addition to that, I also took some other notes on why first peoples traded with newcomers.
The next thing in this project was the most fun, it was a trade simulation. In this, the class was divided into different groups that were present in the time of the fur trade. I was part of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Every group was given different things that they would have traded, we were given things like guns, gunpowder, shoes, and string, and we were told to trade. For every round of trading, we would trade with a different group and there would be a different scenario that we would have to be aware of.
To finish this project off, we had our final project. Originally, the final project was going to be some kind of ad for New France, but it was later changed to be two New France visuals on a certain part of New France. The thing that I decided to focus on for this was the Coureurs des Bois. As you can see in my New France visuals at the start, there is a lot off different thing happening, but there is a reason for everything. In the first image, the words are new trade. The reason that I put this in is because the promise of new trade and riches was the reason for a lot of the Coureurs des Bois. Another thing that I put in this image was a beaver. The beaver was the thing that the Coureurs des Bois would mainly trade because of the value of the beaver fur back then. Beaver fur was in very high demand back then. The hut in the background is a trading post/indigenous home. The Coureurs des Bois would travel to different trading posts to trade with the indigenous people. I also put in a person running with a log on his back. This is to represent the Coureurs des Bois because Coureurs des Bois translates to wood runner. In the second image it says outlawed. This because it became a crime to be a Coureurs des Bois. It got outlawed because the people in charge didn’t want too many people leaving the settlements, especially if they weren’t licensed traders. The images of the person in handcuffs and the jail that replaced the trading post also show the Coureurs des Bois becoming outlawed. People would get arrested if they were caught. It also kind of represents how how some of the Coureurs des Bois had to do this to pay off debt, mainly to merchants. The other thing in this image is the crossed out beaver. This is because the Coureurs des Bois helped with the beaver shortages. All European traders/Coureurs des Bois contributed to this because they were just trying to meet the high demand back home.
So, what did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved? Well, the establishment of New France had various effects. One of the bigger effects it had was the disease that the Europeans brought with them. If they hadn’t given the disease to the indigenous peoples, killing off almost all of them, I feel that indigenous culture would be a bigger part of our lives. Another thing that happened with the establishment of New France is the new trade that was established. The trade allowed things that were not from certain places to get there, with some places going on to have that food as a staple in their everyday lives. The thing that was traded the most, and had the most impact was the beaver. Beaver fur became must have in Europe for things like fashion. Because of the rise in demand, the beaver was hunted almost to extinction in “The New World”. In the end, there were many things that the establishment of New France meant for the people involved, both good and bad.
After a long few months. The biggest project of the year, Destination Imagination, is over. If you don’t know what DI is, you can check out my last post explaining it here. Since the last time I talked about DI, a lot has happened. We have built a lot more props/costumes, finished up our script, and even presented it.
On DI day, our group was pretty chaotic. We had a lot of stuff that was breaking and we were worried if things would work. Luckily, we were able to fix everything and give a pretty good presentation. After our presentation we were ably to do one of the best instant challenges that we’ve done, at least the best acting one. Finally, we took our car parade photo and we were done with DI.
I think that in DI I did an accomplished level of work because I was able to get everything done and I think that I did it good. I did a good job with memorizing my lines and, later on, Naomi’s lines. I also did a good job with the music and the big costume. I do think that our group could have done a better job with meeting up more and distributing the work a bit more evenly.
Welcome back to another blog post! We just finished up another project, and this was one that I really found myself enjoying. We did a project on the renaissance and I focused on the most significant part of it, Leonardo da Vinci and his work. The first thing that we had to learn is how to tell if something is historically significant or else we wouldn’t be able to tell what is the most significant. Once we knew why our thing from the renaissance was important we had to explain why it was in a paragraph. We then had to put down our ideas in a triptych digital gallery. This was all to answer the question “What significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today?”
The first thing that we had to learn was how to tell if something was historically significant. The main way to tell if something’s historically significant is by using NAME. NAME stands for Novelty, what was new about this, Applicability, how is it similar to modern events, Memory, how was it remembered by different parties of people, and Effect, how did it have an effect on people. For something to be historically significant it had to be as many of those thing as possible.
Once we knew if our thing was actually historically significant, we had to give reasons on why if was in our paragraph. We learned about the proper way to write a paragraph and all the different things that must be included in one.
My Paragraph
The final thing that we did was put all of the research down in a triptych. Our triptychs had to have a panel for an art piece and an innovator, a panel for an invention and a societal change, and the final panel was for our own modern versions of all this. I heavily based my triptych on Leonardo da Vinci because I think that there is just so much that he accomplished and that we can learn from him.
So, what significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today? Well, is something is historically significant then we learn from it and we’re more likely to remember the lesson it teaches us. Like you can see in my paragraph, just one renaissance man impacts the past and present in so many incredible, and new, ways. You can also see in my triptych’s middle panel, some of the things that have come out of past things, like inventions evolving, new movements, and even new innovators. So in conclusion, the renaissance was a very important time, because of all the things that we got out of it.
Hi and welcome to my mPOL. Before I even get started, I’d like to make the mPOL declaration. “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.” Now that I’m done with that, lets get into the mPOL. In this first semester, I have changed and grown a lot as a learner. Because of my PLP classes, Scimatics, Humanities, and Maker, I have learned new ways to learn.
The driving questions for this mPOL are “How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?” And “How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?” I’m going to be using past projects and my learning plan to show how I’m doing now and what I want to work on in the second part of the year.
Learning Plan
Some of the things that I put in my learning plan are different to what I am doing now. One of the things that is different is a bunch of the Scimatics stuff. I actually feel that I have followed my learning plan, at least with the growth section. I found that with the more recent work and project we’ve been doing, I’ve really been working on the science portion as well as the math. This was a big thing for me because I found that when I put more work into the part that I have a bit more trouble with, I have some results that were a lot better then before. I actually would have added this in my strength section now. For the other subjects, I feel that, for the most part, it is pretty accurate for me right now.
One thing that I want to work on with my learning plan to reach some of these targets is to really work hard on building the habits that I talked about. The ones that I think are the most important are the ones where I talk about having set time for work and working on things that aren’t due for a while. I’ve for sure gotten a lot better with these things, but I still find myself getting distracted. I really need to start taking these work times a lot more seriously so I don’t end up doing all the work at the last minute. If I do these things, then I think that the outcome will be work that is done a lot better and that I’m a lot happier with.
Maker
The first thing that demonstrated my learning growth was actually the first project that we did this year. This project was the Me as a PLP Learner project. The reason that this demonstrated my growth as a learner is because, going into this, I knew almost nothing about PLP and the way that I would be learning. In this project I learned how to properly use apps like basecamp and showbie. I also learned things like why it really is important to apply what you are learning to the real world and why it’s important to reflect on your work. The reason that it’s important to reflect on your work is because, if you don’t reflect, the work wont stick with you and you wont really learn because, as we learn in PLP, you don’t learn from experience, you learn from reflecting on experience. Another big reason that this showed my growth as a learner is because of my Big Life Journal. My BLJ made my think about who I am and where I want to be. This really got me Thai king about the work that I have to put in to get there and it motivated me to work harder then what I was before.
The other Maker project that I’m going to talk about is the Constructing Creative Communication project. In this project I learned about a lot more amazing tools and apps that I have access to. I also learned that there are many different ways that I can express myself and my learning. The reason that this demonstrated my growth as a learner is because, going into this project, I would sometimes have trouble expressing my work and this project really helped show me some ways to do that. The reason that this is important is because, if the work I do is more fun and memorable then it will stick with me a lot better.
Humanities
The humanities project that I’m going to talk about is the medium is the message project. This was the project where we worked with local businesses to create advertisements for them.This demonstrated my learning growth in a number of ways. The first way is that I started learning why it is important to revise your work. I learned that the client, your team, the teachers, and even you wont always be happy with the work you did so you have to learn to take constructive criticism to improve it.
Scimatics
The scimatics project that I had the most learning growth with was the laser laws project. This was the most recent project we did in scimatics. In this project we learned about the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection and how we can use them. For the end product we made a big laser display to prove the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection. This showed my growth as a learner because I found that, with this project, I actually learned a lot that I didn’t know about science and math. Normally, when I go into a new project or subject, I have at least some idea of what I’m doing from past things, but I had absolutely zero idea what anything was. By the end of the project, I knew how to do these things easily. I think this really showed my learning growth and it had some really cool outcomes.
In the end, I think that I have grown a lot with my learning. I think that the examples that I’ve given, with my different subjects, has shown that I have really changed since the start of the year, and that I’m still changing and growing with my learning. I think that since the start of the year I’ve really improved even with things like my teamwork, my responsibility with my work, and the way that I revise/look back on my work. I think that to sharpen my learning plan I would have to do a lot more work having specific times to get work done and what work I’m doing in that time.
Welcome back! We’ve just finished up another project in humanities. The project we’ve been working on has been quite interesting in a few ways. We’ve been doing poetry. We have done a lot of work with learning different poem terms, learning how to properly read poetry, learn how to write poetry, and dissecting poems. This has all been to answer the driving question, “How might I construct text that shows who I am right now?” We also worked towards doing a live poetry reading.
The first thing that we did was start learning some different poetry terms. A poetry term is a thing thing that you can include in your poems. Example, a rhythm scheme is the pattern in which the poem rhythms. For this we created a note page of sorts where we had the term, what it means, and an example for every term. Close to the end of the project we even had a test on this. If was a fairly simple test where we had a few multiple choice questions and we had to dissect a poem. The poem test was a good insensitive to actually put in the work to learn some of these terms because I most likely wouldn’t have bothered to learn some of the less common otherwise.
The next thing that we did was start working on the poems. This was sort of in two parts because we had to learn to write and read poetry. We had to learn how to write about 9 different types of poetry to put into my book, more on that later. There are also a few reasons why we had to learn to read poetry properly. The first being that we were going to have to present our poems later on. The second reason is because poems can change depending on how you read them. If you don’t read the poem right, you could end up getting the wrong message across. Sometimes, how you read the poem is more important than how it’s written.
The final big thing that we did in this project was creating a book. We made books about all the poems that we wrote. For every poem we had a complementary text, like a photo, and a voice over explaining the poem and what it’s about. We also made an about the author page. On this page we had a photo of us, some writing about us, and an about me video. Once we were done with the book we actually had to present poems on a zoom call. Some people read poems from their books but everyone was put into a group and had to write a new poem. Every group had a different type of poem that they had to do, my group had experience poem, and we had to work together to make a poem about our worldview and also make a background image.
In the end, this was a pretty good project. Even thought I don’t love poetry, I had an ok time doing all this. I learned that there are many ways to construct text that shows who I am right now. There are all the different types of poems and everyone is unique. I learned the importance of how you present the poem, as well as how you write it. I also learned how to use some new tools and apps to enhance my final learning.
