Hi guys, this blog post will be talking about Mpols which is something that you do in PLP during mid term. This is like a self reflection that you do and talk to your teachers and parents about so that you can improve and do better. It’s a chance for you to improve your grade if your not satisfied with them, and is student led. This means that for about 7 minutes, you go through all of your classes and talk about things that you think you do that works and things that you think you can change or do better on. So today I will be doing just that, reflecting on my classes and explaining what I have done so far in school, in PLP.

HUMANITIES

We have done a lot for humanities so far, but its hard to tell what we did in a way because our teacher for humanities sometimes teaches Maker and sometimes our Humanities block is used for Maker and vis versa. So far the most memorable things that we did in humanities was making ads. We learned about different advertising techniques such as Pathos, Ethos, and Logos. I talk about this more in depth in my post Advertising 101. I think that I improved from are first ad, from deep cove and the ads from Oregon.

I think that it would have made my life a lot easier if I had submitted proper drafts on time. I have a habit of both procrastinating and perfection, (if I have enough motivation for it.) This basically means that I have bad time management skills and usually leave things to the last minute. I also cant use drafts. I usually already have a vision of what the final product would look like so I automatically try to get that level, however that also means that I dont make drafts and the drafts that I do make look unfinished or lacking so I try to fix it and it takes a really long time to do so.

The Oregon ads that I made were in my opinion, a great improvement from the deep cove ones for 2 main reasons. The first reason was that I now had a little experience from going to Pound and Grain (check out my blog post Pound and Grain) and from doing it before. I learned how to use the apps properly and I actually used the app. The deep cove add was, until the final product, a drawing that I did and therefore was not clean or professional looking. The second reason was because I submitted the different drafts and got feedback each time. I could have been better at improving the drafts and changing things so that I was more satisfied with my end product though.

The next main thing that we did was the exhibition along with the religion unit. This was where we talked about things that effected our and others worldview and how religion comes into that sequel. I enjoyed learning about different religions view each other, the world and their different perspectives because of that. I can now explain how worldview is represented through religion and vis versa which was something that I couldn’t do before this unit.

In order to understand the unit better, we looked into our own worldview and explained it in an explain everything, which is an app that we used. Personally I didn’t like this assignment because the app didn’t work with me and I thought that it was very confusing at first. What I did like about this though, was that we had to make a mind node. This was a type of brainstorming that suited me a lot better than the explain everything. I thought mine turned out very well and though it wasn’t a major project, I was very proud of it.

In the new unit, we are currently learning about Rome and haven’t done any main projects but I will talk about my learning over all later on.

 

 

 

SCIMATICS

Scimatics is basically science and math combined in to one class, which is taught at different times or sometimes together. In the first unit, we learned about techtonic plates and a review of elementary school math.

The main project for the first term that I focused on for Scimatics was a children’s book. The assignment was to make a children’s book explaining what a techtonic plate is and how it works. I thought that this was both hard and fun. It was really hard because finding wording that children would understand while explaining something that can be really complex like techtonic plates was significantly difficult for me. It was fun becasue it helped me understand techtonic plates in a simpler term and because I hand drew all of the pictures in the book, which made me really proud.

Currently, we are learning about cells, living things and fractions. The living things and cells part is a little hard to understand for me but because we have gone over it a few times I now understand better. I learned about decomposition, proteins, and microbes. I thought that it was interesting and wasn’t as disgusted as my classmates but it is definitely not a career choice that I would choose.

I am fairly confident in my ability to do math so I don’t find any problems with fractions or anything. Because of this I enjoy the science part of this class more when I feel like learning. When I don’t I prefer the easier math because it only has one right answer.

MAKER

Maker in my opinion was basically this blog. This blog was were I was doing all of the reflection for the projects that we did and helped me analyze what my strengths and weaknesses are. For unit 1 we focused on the blogging challenge, weeks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Each week taught me something I hadn’t known before and I really liked the experience. There were many different types of challenges which was part of the reason that it was so fun to do. It was also really cool to receive comments from people around the world and see their opinions on some of the things that you do. It was also fun because after a while my mom also made a blog.

My favourite would defiantly be the portfolio post where we took photos in different ways. I really liked this because I found out that I really like taking different photos and like I mentioned in the post, its cool to try and find different messages you can convey through your photos. For example, in my photo walk, my theme was “human influence” so I took photos of nature that had somehow been altered by humans. It wasn’t hard to take the photos so to make it harder and more fun for me, I had to think of different ways to convey that.

Currently in Maker we are focussing on Destination Imagination (DI). Which is in my opinion, weday for students. So far though, I can see that my group needs to work more on our communication with the rest of the group.on the second day, we had brock into 3 mini groups inside our big group because everyone had different ideas on what to do and wasn’t actually following the instructions.i think that, that is definitely  something to work on escpecially because everyone has god ideas, as long as we can incorporate everyone or get a consensus.

Maker was also where we learned how to use most of the apps that we currently use today, and is really helpful because using these apps has become a daily routine.

PGP

And finally PGP. This was a class that we started a lot later in the school year and was probably both the hardest and easiest class for me. The first thing that we did in PGP was the academic growth plan. This was were we reflected on our classes and asked for grades, explaining the things that we did to get those grades. I think that I am good on reflecting on what I have already done but actually improving on what I said I would improve on is a hard thing to do for me.

 

Now, we are working on goal planning. Again, I can create goals, and steps to get to those goals but actually completing these goals is a lot harder for me. The main reason for this is simply because I’m really lazy. When I dont have the motivation to do something, 9 out of 10 times I wont do it. I realize that if I make a goal about something that I am pationate about than I will probably be more engaged. This is why I said that this is the hardest and easiest class for me. When I make goals on the things that I want to go I then make smaller goals to achieve that big goal. So as long as I make sure that I am passionate about the things I do then I think I will be ok.

 

I have very bad time management skills ad often leave things to the last minute. I have mentioned this before too. To fix this I can timeblock times for me to do things but the actual comitment to do the task is dependant on how motivated I feel at the time. If i feel committed, I can usually finish a task in less than 20 min. However when I can’t focus I take at least an hour. This is a big difference, so I would like to discuss different techniques that I can use to be engaged. When I am actuallly in class, I can pay attention and do assignments handed out. This has lead me to the conclusion that being at home is part of the reason that I can’t pay attention.

 

What do you think are some of the things I can do to fix this? Thank you for reading!