Growth. Its what we aim for in PGP. Over the course of the entire year it’s something that we try to see by stepping back and reflecting on our projects, presentations and progress. Really seeing change all at one time has always been hard for me. I know I’ve improved over the year. I’ve learned new things and improved on old ones, but really rationalizing growth can be difficult. Anyways, in this post I’m going to try to do exactly that. I’m going to look at my growth and reflect on my atomic habits work.

Earlier on in our studies on Atomic Habits, we would set goals of habits we wanted to complete. To show our growth we would make contracts with the teachers that it would eventually get completed. I have a whole post on it here if you want to read more, but it set us up for what we are doing now. At the beginning of Covid, we were given a tic-tac-toe. Three columns of three squares, options of what we wanted to do for our project. We would choose one from each column for each step of the project.

 

The first column is what aspect of the book you were going to focus on. Either a chapter, a law or the whole book. I chose a law. “Make It Easy” because it was one of my favourite parts of the book. That was the easy part. Next we had to decide to either make a video, a tool that would help you keep your habits, or a free choice. I really like creating videos, so my choice was obvious. My next step was to get to work. At the base of any good video is a script, so I opened up pages and began to write. I knew I would be focusing on the “Make It Easy” law and I had a pretty solid vision of where I wanted to go. Once I finished writing I had a couple days left to film so I did the majority of it all around my house, where I could film relatively easily. I wanted to get it done quick because I knew I needed to leave time to edit as well. Editing the video was the most frustrating part. As far as editing software goes, iMovie leaves a lot to be desired. It especially annoying when you finish editing and your video glitches, rearranging all of the audio clips to the wrong places. After a little persistence, I gone it.

This was the biggest project I have done during homeschooling and it really is a lot harder than you realize when you have no class mates or teachers physically there to help you. You have to be completely organized, self started and motivated to get things done. Personally, I like having my home and work separated. When there isn’t a boundary, I always feel a little more stressed while I’m at home and a little less focused while at work. There are definitely upsides too, but it’s definitely difficult to get motivated at home and get into the zone. In terms of growth I’d say all the things I listed above like organization, self motivation and pro activity are what I mainly improved on in this project along with re-sharpening my video skills.

The third column was this post and I chose to create a post alongside a podcast, detailing my growth and experience with this project.