*This blog post only focuses on Humanities competencies and milestones. Click here to access the Maker blog post for this project*

Happy new year everyone! This is my first blog post in a new decade and I’m very excited to say that it is about our annual Winter Exhibiton (2020 edition!). Now most blog posts, us PLP students are required to write about our competencies, and usually we have 3-4 that we are mainly assessed on. But for this one, oh boy, there were many competencies to learn about, and to accomplish.

If you have read my Maker post, you know that we started out with writing an opinion piece, based on what we learnt that class. In the class we talked about why we should care about Star Wars, what the reasons were for us to be studying this in humanities. After what we touched on in that class, which was learning about the Hero’s Journey created by Jospeh Campbell, a so-called 17 step journey every hero goes through and how George Lucas incorporated that into the universe that is Star Wars. Looking back, my opinion piece does show some signs of the competency “Expressing and Supporting Opinions: Express an opinion and support it with credible evidence”. I think I accomplished that, but the evidence part could’ve have been a bit more clearer. Reading it now, I realize this and I think that shows my growth throughout this project, knowing I can come back and reflect on what needs work.

We stepped away from Star Wars for a second, and started to work on short stories, and learning about the structure, the literary terms, and the language of one. Using our understanding of literacy terms and short stories, we completed a short story test that demonstrated our understanding. But we couldn’t just write a test out of the blue, no no no, we did lots of reading. We read all kinds of short stories, examples include “The Sea Devil” by Arthur Gordon, “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury, “The Old Woman” by Elizabeth Brewster and “Penny in the Dust” by Ernest Buckler. We would highlight new terms, then learn about them in class. Once we had a sufficient understanding of these terms, we would record them in our short story chart.

This chart shows our literary terms, plus how they apply to each story. Take “Penny in the Dust” by Ernest Buckler, I highlighted the story according to where I thought the literary terms were, then we went into class learnt about the new terms and I added it to my short story chart.

In my eyes, this shows the competency “Literary Identification and Analysis”, and I think its safe to say I accomplished this one pretty well. I think I could’ve been better at demonstrating “The Writing Process” competency. Yes, I added the terms to a chart, but I didn’t show planning, creating, assessing, or refining the original very well, and if this competency comes up (and I’m sure it will), I’d like to take another crack at it.

I blinked, and suddenly we were sitting in front of a short story test on a Monday morning. I wasn’t sure what to think of this test, usually I’d know if I didn’t know my materials, but overall I felt confident and I knew what I wanted to write. We also did a quick unit around writing a review, so that came in handy in parts 2 and 3 of the test.

Now that I had an understanding of literary terms, and the knowledge of how to write a short story AND a review, it was time to bring Star Wars back into the mix. You can probably guess, but I’ll spell it out just in case. We were writing short stories, about our groups chosen character from the movies. We chose a character that wasn’t focused on in the movies. Ours? General Hurst Romodi, a high general that serves on the Death Star. Only problem, his past. We had seven parts or ‘chapters’ in this story and each were 250-300 words, so we had to keep it short. This is where our group planned who was doing which part, and what was going to be written in the actual parts.

Our first attempt at this could’ve been better, but we all had talked about it so we didn’t feel the need to write ALL of it down. Looking back, I wish we had written our ideas down so that I could show this to you guys, and my teachers to show that we really did learn stuff and we weren’t just robots sitting in class doing nothing.

After this, we came back to the opinion piece, and wrote one more. But this wasn’t just an opinion, it was a review about one of the “Star Wars’ films of our choice. I decided to review “A New Hope”, because it is my favourite in the whole franchise. You can click the link to read the full blog post, but heres a little sneak peek.

Here I think I showed the “Evidence” competency pretty well, and I’m proud because I didn’t do that before. Here’s where the Maker part comes in. This where we actually started writing our stories, mine being Part 3: The Battle Against Good, and constructing our artifact to bring our characters Hero’s Journey to life. The competencies attached, I have done them before but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to worry about them. I feel I kept my game up to par, and accomplished these competencies.

After our stories were approved, refined and polished, we started on our set design, that brings our story together and to life in an interactive for our audience at the Winter Exhibition. Our area, for the Death Star, was the library, so we couldn’t start setting up until the day of the exhibition, December 19. So planning and getting supplies was the only thing we could do. But soon came the day of, and we got straight to work. Emily and I had put in some nights before, making the activity and helping with food. But it all came together in the end, and we displayed our artifacts and our stories with them.

Overall, I think my growth as a learner improved because frankly I thought I wasn’t capable of writing a short story, but through all that research and time spent actually learning, I wrote in my eyes a pretty good short story.

If you want to read my groups full story about Hurst Romodi, you can go check out their blogs, Alex, Anders, Emily, Anthony, Jude, and Gabe.

The video down below is about how I created my artifact, the PA mic, on the Maker side of things.

I want to say a huge thank you to all the teachers who put up with us, despite all the frustration! Thank you for sticking with us and helping us become better people, we appreciate it very much!

~Malaika