January 31

mPOL (again)

It’s that time of year again where I talk bout my growth so far and how I want to progress, thats right it’s mPOL season. And just like last year I have no clue how to start this and it’s due in like a day so here I go. First off the mPOL declaration that I have to read, 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. Anyways, the first area I want to reflect on is humanities. The growth I set for myself in humanities are (in summary) the following :

•working on the social aspect of class, not being shy around people i know are smarter than me

•asking more questions

•being less shy/more extroverted

I set my humanities grade as extending (🌈). I chose extending because sometimes I feel like I’m on the border of accomplished and extending and I just need a little push to make sure I get extending. I’ve grown in those areas quite a bit, I’ve been asking my friends more questions and even though I’m familiar with mostly everyone in grade 9 PLP, I still feel like I’ve warmed up to a few more people. The way I can grow more this year is by paying attention and really thinking about the topic while the teachers talking just in case I have a question I can’t ask later. I usually realize I wasn’t paying attention or didn’t catch something sort of crucial to the project and I feel too embarrassed to admit I wasn’t listening or forgot. That’s another way I can improve, asking the teacher something even if I forgot and my friends dont know either.

For Maker 9, these are what I set for myself for growth (again, in summary):

•put more effort into group projects

•try to be the “leader” in group projects, being responsible and making sure everyone is on task.

•actually put effort into Destination Imagination (isn’t happening this year I think)

I set my maker grade expectation as extending (🌈) as well. I chose extending because I wanted to push myself to work harder. With the projects we did this year I don’t think there were many big projects that we had to work in groups for, small things here and there but nothing super big. With a small project that happened recently, we made a rollercoaster and I know I put a lot of work into that. Another example of a group “effort” I put a lot of work into would be setting up for the winter exhibition, even though thats not a project I feel like I helped a good amount in my room. A way I can refine the goals I set for myself would be making sure I dont overdo it with the work I do. I want to make sure everyone does an equal amount of work so it’s not unfair for some people. 

Another class I set my expectation as extending (🌈) for is science, I chose extending because I knew I already really liked science and I feel like I’m really good in some science subjects. Here are the growth goals I set for myself:

•working on focusing, not always talking to my friends.

•work on ignoring friends, even if I know it might be a bit rude I need to remember to do my work.

•maybe sitting alone or somewhere else if I really need to.

Honestly, I haven’t grown the most in these areas, with some projects it’s easy to talk and do work like the most recent project we did with operation boxes where I could paint or draw while talking and not have any issues but sometimes if I needed to do work that required thinking then sometimes if someone started talking to me I felt as if I didn’t respond I would be being rude. To achieve my learning plan goal, I need to remind myself to tell my friends that I need to work or remind them to do their work if I noticed they arent done too.

For the extra minutes on my presentation here are some “jumpstart” questions provided to us:

•“of the work you completed this year what are you least proud of?” I’m probably least proud of would be the puppet show on reproduction for science, I never finished it and I kept thinking that “enough time has passed it’s too late to start making the video”, basically the ultimate form of procrastination “due tomorrow? Nah, do tomorrow” (I did that with science blog posts too). I wanna work on not doing that next term and handing in work even if it’s late.

  • “Did all the work you completed this year meet your standards?” Definitely not, It’s hard to always have your work at your standard or higher without burning yourself out. Also different people have a different standard for their work, one persons standard might be higher and easier to burnout than someone else. I definitely want to work on getting my work up or past standard next term. Some ways I can remind myself to get the standard up would be some accountability for myself or a reward I can give myself if I do good work on something.
  • “When did you feel dissatisfied during the working process of working on projects?” It differs from each project but an example I can give is the most recent humanities project. I liked the topic we were doing and I liked the teacher but there was no break in work it was constant homework, understandably it was a 2 week project and there needed to be homework to do it in time, it just felt like I was behind in it (even though it was my fault for not focusing and getting behind because of it).

I think what I’ve written is a little over 7 minutes so I’ll leave my mPOL here, thank you again for coming to my presentation.

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January 4

Why am I glowing?

Winter exhibition.

So we finished our projects and held an exhibition to show off what we made. The grade 8s made what they called “Pandora’s box”. The obviously better grade (grade 9s) made videos of a theme and how it relates to James Camerons “Avatar”. My theme was religion and beliefs so i made a video about different religions and the Na’Vi’s religion.
(Oh yeah here’s the video if you’re curious vvv)

The exhibition was super fun! Our engaging activity was face painting so we took shifts painting peoples faces. Some of the grade 12s liked the designs i did so they kept asking for me to paint them. Some of the face paint examples (people could mix and match)
Of course Whats a blog post without the reflecting… the ways I probably could have improved during the exhibition were being at my station longer than the face paint station. I also could have been more productive with making my video since I waited till the rough draft due date to start editing and filming b-roll. I definitely could have done a better job on answering how avatar is connected to some real life themes. Overall I think I did okay on this project but theres lots of room for improvement thats for sure.

Here’s some other photos I could find of the exhibition:

A mountain banshee I made

The snacks of course

I drew the mountain banshees too

My friends 🙂

That’s it for this post, my next post is most likely my mPOL. Until next time, bye bye!

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January 3

Viva La Revolution!!

Welcome back! 2 projects are done and this is the first blog post of them. I’ll be talking about the Revolution project we just finished up. Since we got to choose the revolution we got to research, I chose the American revolution. Why? Because I wanted to, nah I actually don’t remember but anyways. After we chose we got put into the groups, we were told if we were defending the revolution (effective) or prosecuting it (ineffective), I was defending the American revolution. Most people got their first pick like me but some got their second or third because of the amount of people needed. Groups were made, and we started to study our revolution so we could fill out a graphic organizer, here’s what mine ended up looking like.  

Since we got to choose the topic we were interested in, I didn’t have much of a problem focusing. Of course thats not saying that I didn’t do it efficiently, there was definitely a faster way I could have filled out the organizer or better ways to research what I needed to know instead of assuming i’ll need to know it. After that, we starting making our affidavits for the mock trial. 

(While I was editing this, I couldn’t find the affidavit to link to this post, sorry you gotta use your imagination)

I’m not going to go over all of the exhibits but theres one I want to talk about which is the witness interview, our witness was John Lauren’s (played by yours truely). “He” talked about what he did to help the revolution and to try and free slaves. I think my group could have worked together better for the affidavit and filming. Almost the whole time the people pulling the groups weight was Susan E

After we filmed all of it we uploaded and handed it in and then it was done and we got to just chill out for a few classes. The project went okay, it definitely wasnt my favourite but it wasnt the worst project. Anyways, look out for the next post, its all about the Winter exhibition. Goodbye for now!