“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.”

Looking back on my learning this year in grade 9, I realized that passion is the key to my success. While I have times where my work did not showcase my enthusiasm, I have also experienced projects that I found interest in that would reflect my creativity and love for learning.

This year I’ve worked on so many projects that helped me grow as a learner, some highlights for me were Metaphor Machines, and Let’s Get Riel.

Metaphor Machines

During this project I got to learn about the Revolution of Meiji. My group and I learned the story of the revolution and then got to work making a machine to represent it. At first when hearing about this I wondered how that could ever be possible, but after learning about metaphors and doing a worksheet showing us how to do them, I was able to make a connection to my machine that represented an event in the storyline of the Meiji Revolution. My connection was a ball on a string that swung from one side of the machine to another representing the government of Meiji swinging into new ideas. And my other group members made amazing connections too! Here’s a photo of the machine:

Let’s Get Riel

In this project we learned about Louis Riel and how he was portrayed. I enjoyed this project because we also got to learn about grammar. I love writing and telling a story and at one point wanted to be an author. I loved to learn about punctuation and how to make your writing proper because I love to get my opinions across properly and clearly so they can be understood in the easiest way possible. In this project I got to expand on my knowledge of writing and punctuation by learning new skills that will help me later on in life.

Science

This year in science I had a lot of fun learning about advanced food chains, the periodic table, electricity, and especially how cells reproduce. I always love learning about cells and how they work and I’ve found them super cool since I had my first lesson on them in grade 8. In that lesson we learned about how the body and cells react when you get sick, I learned so much in that class and it answered so many of my questions like how the body fights off bad germs and the different types of cells. In my project on reproductive cells this year, Seeing Double, I learned about how different types of cells and creatures reproduce.

This project also answered a lot of my questions about the different types of reproduction, and how different animals or plants reproduce! Here’s a video I made with my group members representing the stages of mitosis!

Rocky Mountain High

One great learning experience for me was the storytelling in the Rockies field study. At first when I found out about this trip, I didn’t want to go, but after a while of thinking I finally decided to leave my comfort zone and go. Not only did I learn loads of facts about the Canadian pacific railroad that I often annoy my family with, but I also got super close with a few of my classmates and got to know them even better.

Over that trip we learned about the journey of how the railroad was made, and we got to visit different museums and landmarks to help us learn. 

Moving Forward

To do better in future projects, I’m going to try to find passion in all my projects by finding things I like to do in them. Such as writing stories, drawing, building, and designing. I want to be able to dedicate more time to them. By the end of this year I want to be able to find passion in all my work in order to exceed.