I guess this is a mPol. Very different this year with this presentation being past a halfway point. I guess that just means more to review, and the more the merrier. 

Learning Plan

Goals

My goals this year mainly revolved around my, and my classmates, work ethic. You can almost always be more focused on the project you are working on, and it never hurts to. Along with it being a beneficial thing to improve upon, it is probably my weakest area too.

Part of my learning plan from beginning of the year.

Saying you’re going to improve your work ethic, and actually doing it are very different things. With my previous goals, like improving my writing, it’s pretty straightforward. I spend more time on the writing, and it is usually better. Work ethic doesn’t exactly work like that, or at least not for me. Improving work ethic for me is going to start with getting involved with 

 

Future Growth

Some newer goals I have going forward would now be responsibility, and time management. I would have defiantly enjoyed another two days for this post too. Often right now I only start a part of a project or it’s blogpost right when I need to. I don’t provide much, if any, buffer days. This effects all by work because it can start to pile up, and my work becomes sloppy and rushed.

Humanities

The biggest area I wanted to work on in Humanities was by writing. Don’t get me wrong, I think my writing has improved significantly since that start of Grade 8. Just because it has improved doesn’t mean that stories I am trying to tell are perfect, and crystal clear to read.

Learning

Lots of my learning in Humanities this semester has been working in groups and building a strong story to tell. The best example I can think of for building better stories this semester has been my Frankenstuffies project. In the beginning of the project we read the book ‘Leviathan’ to get a better understanding of stories, and how one should look. With that knowledge, we started to craft a  character to base our stories on. Our characters got personalities, likes and dislikes, and thoughts. Most of these aspects never came into the video, but they helped turn our Frankenstuffie into more of a person.

Once our character had been made, we needed to form a story around them. This part taught me the most about building a strong story. If I didn’t construct my character’s personality, I would have had a much weaker story, and thus video.

My big takeaway for building strong, and engaging stories is having something like a character to center it around. The more thought out the center is, the more detailed and engaging the story can be.

Growth

I have gotten to a point in my writing were getting words onto paper is no longer the problem, it’s turning those words into a working sentence. The storytelling part of Humanities is arguably the most difficult, and once I have fully figured it out, my writing will be greatly elevated.

Maker

The biggest thing I did for Maker this semester has been DI. It not only took the most work, and lasted the longest amount of time, but it also taught me the most skills. DI, or Destination Imagination, requires skills like critical thinking, imagination, and teamwork. My challenge for DI was to build a machine that has two configurations to launch a beanbag. Along with that we also needed to present a story based around the machine. The story part once again ties really nicely back into Humanities. The building part is where more unique learning happened for me.

Learning

The machine part of DI got me to work on physical building and problem solving. The first part of building the machine was figuring out what we wanted to build and how. That was one of the processes that involved the most team building/work. It was me and one other group member who were mainly focused on building the machine so not only did we need to communicate with each other, but also the other four team members.

 

Building different things like machines, presentation, or videos, always teach me the most. With DI being centered on critical thinking, I learnt a lot about it. Critical thinking is a strange thing because I don’t consider it as something you can learn. To really become better at it you need to use it a lot. You can easily tell how much my critical thinking improved in the span of DI. In the beginning, I wasn’t fully thinking through the machine. I was over complicating it, with no idea if I was going to work. I was pretty much a fish out of water.

Once the end of DI came around I was deciding to wait a minute to think through what I was going to do. Not only did this mean that I was able to work on the machine more efficiently, but it is one of the most important life skills.

 

Growth

My critical thinking is at a place were I can competently think outside the box and solve different complex solution like DI. The area that I will want to continue to focus on, and improve in, is team work. Being able to work with anyone and collaborate flawlessly is a skill that will always be useful and good to have.

Science

Science is a very material focused subject by design. There isn’t much of a way to get around that part. Some might think, “It’s PLP, don’t you want to have more project based learning?”, and my answer to that is no. Just having projects aren’t good, and not having any aren’t good either. In mainstream, something you do in every class is note taking. Spoiler alert, Science in PLP has a lot too.

Learning

You will never meet someone who was able to go through Highschool and Post Secondary without notetaking. That was made very clear during my American Revolution project. I am fully convinced I would have failed that project if I didn’t know how to take notes.

There isn’t just one project I can pull on to show note taking in Science, which is a great thing. It means that there was always note taking on some degree in every project. A great example of note taking was during my reproduction project.

Growth

I can now effectively gather information through note taking, but that information isn’t going many places right now. The next step for me is to work on converting information into a good, solid presentation.