Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am an expert of 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 offering feedback I can use to improve as a learner. 

Over the past year, I’ve grown a lot as a PLP learner, but also as a person. This is a program that lets us take responsibility of our own learning, and really lets us thrive. I’ve learned a lot about myself and others, as well as gained a bunch of new skills that I can apply not just to school, but to the rest of my life. In this presentation, I will show what exactly I’ve been learning in PLP, and that I’m ready for grade nine. Okay, let’s get into it. 

When I first started out the year, I didn’t have a lot of expectations for myself. We started off the year by making learning plans, which made us think about what we planned to achieve in PLP over the year. When I made the plan, I hadn’t really thought about how much work I wanted to put in to my projects.

This is the proficiency scale, and it’s how we’re graded in PLP. In humanities, I had originally put “effective” as the proficiency I expected myself to achieve. I was advised to change this to sophisticated, which has suited me much better. Since then, I’ve achieved this proficiency in all of my PLP classes. This has taught me that I should always try my hardest, and that even if I don’t get extending, I will still have done my best, and I can say that I’m proud of my work.

I wanted to start with the projects that I’ve FAILed at this past year, because in PLP, we believe that to FAILing, or first attempt in learning, is how we grow as learners. This is especially relevant in our project Blue-Eyed Brutes in Horned Helmets, in which we learned about the Vikings, and why they did what they did. We also learned about how they were so successful in their raids. The first keystone was a Viking character card, in which we made we created a fictional Viking, and had to make it as accurate as we could. I think that I could’ve put a lot more effort into this keystone, because I wasn’t very proud of my final product. 

I don’t believe that the reason that my final product was rather bland had less to do with effort and more to do with me not knowing which direction to take the project to make it better. This realization was one of the first big FAIL moments for me this year. Not because the final product was something terrible, but because I realized that I could have made it so much better. This is what I would describe as my biggest FAIL this year.

The project that I found the most interesting this year would have been Mind Over Matter, which was a science project in which we examined the structure of atoms and theories like the kinetic molecular theory. The first keystone was kind of a test of our knowledge of determining density, volume, and mass, so there isn’t much to reflect on. The second and third keystones are a different matter. 

The second keystone was based around diffusion, which is a scientific process that we demonstrated by using gummy bears to create our own experiment to show how different variables affect the rate of diffusion. I loved this project, and I think it’s been my favourite so far, because of the amount of freedom we were given in our experiments. We were really given the opportunity to take this project in whatever direction we wanted. Here’s the keynote that I made to show the results of my experiment. 

The third keystone was definitely my favourite, as we got to use the coding software Scratch to create fun video games. They still had to somehow relate to the structure of an atom or the subatomic particles we had been learning about. My game definitely had the most revisions of any project I’d done this year, as I am not exactly the best coder out there. However, after numerous revisions and a lot of improvising, I finally came out with a product that I was proud of. 

This is the project that I wanted to talk about then most because of how much I learned throughout it. When I say “learned,” I don’t just mean about science. I also mean what I’ve learned about PLP, revising drafts, coding, and surprisingly, public speaking. I’ve struggled a lot with many of these things before, so this project was really important in my growth this year.   I feel like this project has really given me some useful tools and experiences that I can applications in the real world, as well as for the rest of PLP. 

I’d like my last project that I present to you today to really bring the presentation to an end that makes sense, and to end on a positive note. So I’ve decided to talk about the Oregon trip. 

In our latest project, and the one that we worked on for the exhibition, we looked at media, and how it affects our daily lives. The first two keystones aren’t as relevant, and I didn’t learn a lot from either of them. However, the final keystone was quite the endeavour. 

The project that was attached to the Oregon Coast Field Study was called “The Medium Is The Message,” and was centred around the idea that media affects our daily lives in almost infinite ways, without us even realizing it. 

Our assignment was to create ads for businesses that were located in Oregon, and my group was given the Columbia River Maritime Museum, which is a museum that was located on the Columbia River, and was dedicated to it’s history. It’s famous because it focuses on the shipwrecks that line the river, as well as the sand bar that runs under the river, and makes it difficult for ships to cross. 

 

All of the other groups got to interview their businesses and
ask them questions like what their target audience were, what they were most proud of about their business, as well as other questions that only the business could answer. Sadly, the woman who we had planned to interview decided that she would rather go on lunch break than to take five minutes out of her day to benefit our education. What a kind person. 

To sum it up, we didn’t really know a lot about our business, so we had to improvise A
LOT. Still, when the exhibition came, we did a decent job of showing off our work. We went through a lot of revisions on our advertisements, but because this was the last humanities project of the year, we had learned a lot about working around problems, so it all worked out in the end. 

This year has been a crazy one for me, and I think that I’ve gained the experience to to be able to advance to grade nine. I’ve been through a lot of revisions, a lot of projects, and been under a lot of stress. Still, I’ve managed to come out on top of all of my work, and I think that I’m ready for grade nine. Thank you so much for listening to my presentation (I know it’s been a lot), and I hope you’ve learned about my growth as a learner this year!