Hi everyone,
We are now wrapping up the 2019-2020 school year. This was grade 8 for me. Terms 1 & 2 were fairly normal terms but term 3 was the odd one. As you all know the coronavirus pandemic has forced most cities to go into lockdown. This has made term 3 very different and challenging. But as we did in the middle of this school year, we are doing another presentation of learning.
We’ve completed many projects since our mpols. I think I have completed all that work to the standard set by our teachers. I’ve found it more difficult during online schooling though. It’s tougher to be motivated to do your absolute best on assignment when your trapped and bored. Although, the biggest challenge I’ve faced is organization. I often turn in assignments late because I haven’t organized myself well enough. The other reason for this is I’ve found it hard to prioritize during this period. I often don’t know what I should do next and I spend to long on one thing which isn’t due for a couple of days and then I don’t have enough time to do the assignments which is due sooner and I just get really stressed and everything ends up being late. What I believe I need to do fix this is time block my calendar and list assignments based on priority in the app things.
One of my biggest accomplishments this year was my improvement in blog posts. If you check one of my blog posts from the student blogging challenge, or my Oregon post you can see they aren’t nearly as good as recent blog posts, such as my argh matey, or DI blog posts.
Overall I have achieved my academic goal for this year, straight A’s (except for art, but that doesn’t count). I made that a goal as that was what I got in grade 7 so I wanted to keep that up. I also think getting straight A’s shows commitment to academics. In order to achieve this I had to complete all my assignments close to the best of my ability. I also needed to show a growth mindset. One great example of this was in my it’s the end of the world project where we needed to sing a song. That was not something I wanted to do. I was very nervous but I kept an open mind and I think I did a good job.
If you read my mpol post you will remember that I had to come up with a learning goal for the end of the year that goal was “how can I use the resources I have to improve my productivity and keep a good school/life balance?” I have made a few steps towards that goal but I still think it’s my learning goal for next year. During the second term I got better at maintaining a good school/life balance. But during quarantine it all kind of blurred together. One the things I got quite good at using by the end of the second term was the app things. I would organize all my work and know when it was due so I would have less stressful nights working on an assignment due the next day. I did not use things very effectively over the last few months which is one of the main factors to my lack of organization.
This year we learned about advertising and religion at the start of the year. Then we moved onto some eras in history. The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, and the colonial times in New France. We used so many methods of presentation throughout those projects. From songs, to stories, to keynote, we learned how to use text and speech to communicate. I feel I have done a good job in Humanities this year. I believe my best project was my Middle Ages project.
Throughout Scimatics we have learned tons of interesting things. Such as, graphs, surface area and volume, cells and diseases, and molecules. My best work in scimatics this year was either in our molecules unit, or in our Ultimate design challenge.
Maker has consisted of many different types of projects. We went from learning about growth mindset, and how to use our iPads basic features, to blue sky’s, and then the most challenging of all, DI. I learned many valuable skills in Maker but I think my best work was in our Blue Sky projects. I studied my topic intensely and learned many skills, and my design skills improved a lot. Another thing maker especially has taught me about is how to handle lots of pressure and stress. Thank you exhibitions and DI for teaching me this.
PGP is one of those subjects you don’t really notice your doing a lot. I think we haven’t learned much about PGP since the mpols though.
To summarize this blog post, I still need to work on my time management and organization. I have learned a lot this year and have a lot to be proud of. I will look back at this year and be like wow, I learned so much in grade 8. That wraps up this year of learning. I will still have a couple of blog posts coming in the next week or so.
My learning goal is the same for next year as it was for the end of this year: “how can I use the resources I have to improve my productivity and keep a good school/life balance?”