Author Archives: susane

Susan’s tPOL 2024🌿

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Hello all, and welcome back to my blog. Today I will be presenting my tPOL for grade 10! This has been a crazy year, and I’m so ready to reflect on it. Over this year, I’ve faced many challenges and kept going despite them. Today I’ll tell you all about my success behaviours that I’ve utilized this year to complete quality work, and even which ones I am more lacking in and stretching to try and get better at to make myself an even better learner.

Declaration: 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.

The first success behaviour I’m going to talk about is ownership and responsibility. This one is a bit tricky, as it is not really my strong suit. To have ownership and responsibility means to take responsibility for my work, which involves things like getting it done on time. That’s not something I’m very good at. Sometimes, though, I’m really good at taking ownership for my work and just doubling down and getting it done.

A great example of this was my work in the project “who am I going to be?” Personally, I absolutely loved this project. I think it jogged some great reflection for me on who I am and who I want to be as a person. For my blog post on this project, I took responsibility for my own learning and I got it done on time, with quality that I was very happy with. In that blog post, I shared who I want to be as a person with my audience, making deep reflections on the work that I had done for the project. I feel as though this project defined who I CAN be when I put my mind to it. In this project, we also read a book. We all got to choose different books and I chose a book called “Between Two Kingdoms.” When reading this book, I immersed myself in my learning and allowed myself to demonstrate the enthusiasm I had for my learning. I took ownership for my learning and got things done: finished that book, and wrote that blog post.

Unfortunately, there are many more projects where I FAILED at this behaviour. Now usually, FAILing means First Attempt In Learning. Devastatingly, this wasn’t just my first: it was my second, third, fourth, and so on. An example of how I managed to pull this off is my work in our most recent project in humanities: Chasing the Canadian Dream. In this project, I have done the opposite. I did not get things done. While I have worked hard in all my classtime to finish my book with quality, I did not finish in time for the Monday morning due date. Instead of taking agency for my learning and finishing it up at home, I let it pile up and didn’t finish it.

I think a goal of mine that I will work on over the summer and for next year is that I want to take agency for my work and be able to get things done with quality, like I did in “Who am I going to be?”

The next success behaviour I am talking about is contribution. This behaviour is a part of the engagement category. I think that I am often very engaged in class: when we are talking and learning, I am constantly reflecting on what we are learning about and contributing my ideas to the class.

A great example of this was our Romeo and Juliet project in humanities. In this project, every time that we would do readers theatre in class, I volunteered myself to read for the class. When we did class discussions, I would contribute my ideas.

Another great example of this behaviour is my most recent work in PGP on the project Back to the Future. I think that I contributed to my class’s success in the spring exhibition.

During this project, I was passionate about what I was talking about, and it reflected in my work and my contribution to our area. I was able to contribute my thoughts and ideas and present them to my audience without interfering or getting in the way of my peers. I think that this is a great skill of mine, because I’m really good at sharing my ideas without overstepping and taking from someone else’s. This is a good behaviour to commonly demonstrate in PLP, because it’s always people trying to speak their mind, and it’s easy to take it too far and take away from your peers.

The final behaviour that I’m talking about today is citizenship, which is under the category of conduct, ethics, and integrity. In our success behaviours, citizenship is defined and expressed by demonstrating leadership by setting a positive example, and encouraging and supporting classmates in their academic and personal pursuits.

After reflecting on this for a bit, I think that I stand somewhere in between on this behaviour. I consider myself to be a pretty supportive classmate and friends to my peers, but I’m not so sure about the leadership part. This is a hard pill to swallow, for a few reasons. For starters, this may seem surprising, but I have always considered myself to be a bit of a leader. As I’ve started to get older, I stopped filling that role of a leader because I started to get more self conscious about what other people think. Another reason this seems odd to me is because in many other aspects of my life, I do fill leadership positions: for example, my gymnastics and coaching, but at school, I’ve stopped doing that. 

I think this is something that I want to stretch for in my following years in PLP: I’d like to try even harder to set a positive example. This is something I especially want to work on because it not only benefits me but it can benefit my peers, too. I think that that’s really good because I love helping other people.

Thanks for coming to my tPOL! See you next year!

Let’s Get Crazy!

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Hey guys, welcome back to my blog! Today I will be telling you all about our most recent project in PLP, “Cray Cray, Yay Yay.” The driving question for this project was “Why does it take a “crazy” person to change the world?” Over the course of this project, I researched and gathered lots of evidence to help me attempt to answer the question. Let’s dive in!

One of the first things we did in this project was a mini PechaKucha. For mine, I chose to present and talk about Frank Sinatra and how he changed the world. A PechaKucha is a presentation that contains 20 slides, where you talk about your topic for 20 seconds per slides. For this mini PechaKucha, the goal was to get us accustomed to presenting in this format and reflect on why it takes someone “crazy” to change the world. That’s why this PechaKucha was only 10 slides, not 20.

For my PechaKucha on Frank Sinatra, I think I did a good job. I am especially proud of myself for this one because this assignment was done during the week that I was away in Quebec to cheer my sister in in the International PeeWee Tournament. Normally, when I am away, I end up falling behind and being behind in my work afterwards. This time, though, I made sure to keep up and follow along from Quebec. As soon as I got back from Quebec, I presented my PechaKucha to the class. I’m glad that I managed to buckle down and stay on top of my work, and I think that this shows my growth as a learner.

If you want to see some more from that first mini PechaKucha, I have logged my learning process here. 

After our mini PechaKucha, we got put into groups for our final PechaKucha. Since the final product of this project is that big PechaKucha, done in a group of 4. But before we could get to the PechaKucha, we had to pick a theme and research. I was put into a group with Alex, Sofia, and Kadin. We picked the theme “Sustainability Solutions.” This theme revolves around sustainability and how it takes a “crazy” person to help us solve the problem that is our wounded planet. Before we could do anything else, though, it was Seattle time! The class went on a field school to Seattle for a week to gather evidence to help us answer the driving question. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it to Seattle for various reasons. Luckily, the rest of my group did go.

While the rest of my group was in Seattle, me and a few of the other people who stayed back, including my friends Kira and Brooke, worked on research and essays about “crazy” people who are local to Vancouver. The local “crazy” person that I picked was Bryan Adams. Over the course of the week, I researched about him and found what he has done to help change the world. If you want to see my learning process and final essay from this assignment, click here. Overall, I am proud of this work because I am happy with how my essay turned out. Here is a photo of me with a couple of my friends who didn’t go to Seattle, writing our essays.

Once everyone came back from Seattle, we began to collaboratively work with our groups to begin to aim towards that final PechaKucha. We started by generating some Need to Know questions and then researching and using the information that was gathered in Seattle in order to answer those questions.

Once we had that done, it was time to create a story spine. For this, each member of our group did an individual story spine, and then we worked collaboratively on one big story spine. Here is our story spine:

Once we had our story spine approved, it was time to work on the beginnings of a script for our final PechaKucha. Each member of our group took a few pieces of the story spine to expand on. If you want to see some of that expansion, go here. 

After we had this expanded story spine, it was time to create it as a script with sections for each separate slide. Each slide we estimated was about 40-50 words since they are 20 seconds. Once we had these sections, we assigned some slides to each presenter. After that, it was time to pick photos to put for the slides, and finally, time to practice to present!

Unfortunately, due to a conflict with my gymnastics, I was unable to make it to the PechaKucha night to present with my peers. Thankfully, Alex and Sofia were able to pull through and present it well! I’m very glad I got put with a great group who was flexible enough to be able to present even without 2 members of the group. Here are the final slides of our PechaKucha slide deck:

Overall, our PechaKucha went amazing and throughout this project, I managed to keep up on all of my work, and nothing I did was late. I’m super proud of myself for this, as this is something that I have been striving for since grade 9. I’m super happy with how much I’ve improved on my organization and time management as a learner.

If you are interested in seeing our collaborative learning process throughout this project, click here. This is the document where we stored all of our learning.

Thank you for reading!

Susan

Bryan Adams is “Crazy”?!

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Hello all, and welcome back to my blog! Lately, I’ve been hard at work on a project called “Cray Cray, Yay Yay!” The driving question of this project is “why does it take a “crazy person” to change the world?” So, we have been learning all about these “crazy people” and how we need a little bit of crazy to change the world. One of the “crazy” people I have focused on is Bryan Adams. Bryan Adams grew up in North Vancouver and is now a very well-known music artist. Let’s dive into him and his “craziness”.

When you think of Vancouver, you might not think of changing the world at first. There aren’t very many people from Vancouver who have truly changed the world. Or, at least, there aren’t very many well-known people who have changed the world. Bryan Adams has not quite changed the world in the traditional sense, but he has heavily impacted many people’s lives for the better in other ways, and we should all strive to be like that. He has changed the world by using his voice to speak up for the rights of other people including homeless youth and Ukrainian refugees, as well as advocate for environmental change.

Bryan Adams has proven his care for local homeless youth in Vancouver, BC. In July 2010, The Bryan Adams foundation made a grant to Covenent House, which supports homeless youth in Vancouver. By using his fame and wealth to help those struggling, and especially connecting that back to his roots in Vancouver, he’s shown how he cares for his hometown and the other people who share that with him. Despite the fact that he has become famous and has so much influence, he still takes care and makes sure to remember where he came from.

Bryan Adams has shown that he truly cares about others all around the world. In June 2022, The Bryan Adams Foundation made a grant to the Teresa Maxova Foundation, which supports Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic. They aim to support the education and integration of these refugee’s children and their parents into society. The Bryan Adams Foundation aims to improve people’s lives by providing specific grants to help people around the world. Though Adams is from Vancouver, he’s using his influence and money for good, even in other parts of the world. 

You may know about how he’s donated to charities, or revolutionized music. But Bryan Adams has also used his influence to advocate for environmental change. When people were talking about old-growth logging in BC, Adams chose to use his voice and speak up. According to CBC, “Adams said he and others were not calling for the end of all logging in the province. He said they want steps taken to protect old-growth trees, instead of letting loggers ‘plow through and cut everything down.'” (source) Adams knew that he had to take action and speak up. Alongside others speaking up with him against it, he helped put it to a stop. Through doing this, he showed the world that he knew to use his voice for good, and paved a path for others to follow and advocate for what they believe in.

Bryan Adams is an influential figure in Vancouver, BC’s history. He’s used his ‘craziness’ to speak up for what he believes in, advocate for change, and help others. It’s not very often that you might find someone that truly embodies the culture of Vancouver, who can speak up and advocate for what they believe in. Adams is a true role model of how we can help and create change for a better world.

So far, I’ve really had a great time working on this project, and stay tuned to see more from my blog!

Who Am I Going To Be?

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Who am I going to be? Recently, we went on a journey in Humanities to attempt to find an answer to that question – or, at least, to reflect on it, and reflect on ourselves. 

Now, I’m going to be so honest with you, faithful blog readers: I don’t really know who I am going to be, nor who I want to be. After a whole project full of questions, and answers, and books, and activities? I still don’t really know. But I am going to try to answer.

As we dove into this project, I wasn’t that excited. We had to read a book, and though I am not a super slow reader, I am also not a super speedy reader. But, as soon as I picked up my chosen book, it was love at first sight. “Between Two Kingdoms,” by Suleika Jaouad, caught my eye. It was a book all about her experience with cancer, and her experience afterwards, as a cancer survivor. If you want to know more, click here to read my notes and reflections. As I read this book, and enjoyed every step of it. I got to see the world through Suleikas lense, learning the lessons that she had learned from experience. Some key takeaways I got from this were that change is a part of life, and though it might take time, you have to learn to accept the changes. I also learned that you are not always as isolated as you feel. While it may feel like it, there are still people on your side. I learned not to let that feeling of isolation push you away from the people around you. I feel as though this is something that really resonates with me. Constantly, I feel so alone, and I let that give me a reason to distance myself further from the people around me. If I truly look around, I can really see that, actually, many people are on my side. So really, if I’m trying to answer the question of “who am I going to be?” My goal is to be someone who notices the people around me, and who accepts change and challenges as a part of my life.

Another thing that we did in this project that guided me was our gratitude exercises. Each day in class, we each got a sticky note and wrote down one thing we were grateful for. Every single day, I sat down in the morning, and thought until I had the perfect thing to be grateful for. Every time, after writing it on that sticky note and putting it on the wall with everyone else’s, I walked away feeling fulfilled and happier. I remember, on the final morning, I wrote, “I am grateful for the sky and the sun and the trees and the mountains and the oceans and the lakes.” This is something that at the beginning of all of this, I never would’ve written down. But I really am grateful for the sky and the sun and the trees and the mountains and the oceans and the lakes! Throughout all of these sticky note moments, I could close my eyes and see what I was grateful for. I was able to relive scenarios I loved, or imagine ones that have the potential to flourish in my future. When I closed my eyes, I was able to see everything I loved, everything I live for, the things that define my happiness. Who am I going to be? I am going to be grateful, to live my life to the fullest. I am going to take a deep breath and love how it feels in my lungs. I am going to see the world with open eyes and an open heart, taking in every single bit of it with so much love.

Finally, we got the opportunity to conduct our interviews. I decided I wanted to interview one of the coaches from the gym that I do my gymnastics at. She is truly an inspiration to me. Through my interview, I asked a series of questions. Here were all the questions I asked:

– “How do you push through challenges and hardships in your life and in your career?”

– “What gets you out of bed every morning?”

– “Who or what inspires you to be better?”

– “Tell me about a situation where you had to lead through change and uncertainty in your career.”

– “How do you contribute to creating a positive environment?”

– “How do you deal with stress, and what coping mechanisms do you find effective?”

At first, I didn’t have much hope for the interview. I didn’t think I would learn as much from it as I was learning from the book, nor as much as I would later on learn from the gratitude notes. After having the interview, though, I realized I was wrong. Though I still think I ended up learning more from reflecting on the other things, I still think I did learn from my interview. Everything that my interviewee had to say had to do with keeping a positive mindset. She also frequently brought up accepting challenges and overcoming them instead of giving up, prioritizing herself, and surrounding herself with people that are good for her. I feel as though these are always important things to think about in life. Since my interview, I have started to make an effort to maintain relationships with those that I love, and slowly distancing myself from people who have a negative impact on me. I also have been trying to prioritize myself and my mental health, giving myself some more rest, and forgiving myself when I don’t perform as well as I wanted to, especially when it’s due to being tired. Who am I going to be? I am going to prioritize myself. I am going to be someone that people want to have in their lives, because I make a positive impact on them. I am going to stay as positive as possible, and I am going to accept and overcome any challenges I face. I am not going to give up. I am going to work hard, and I am going to be good to myself.

Throughout this whole project, I was thinking. I was reflecting on every experience I have had, and every experience I might have in the future. “Who am I going to be? What am I going to do, what am I going to see, and in this moments, who am I going to be?” I would repeat these questions over and over, wondering. In fact, these are questions I regularly ask myself. Normally, I will think more on the negative side. “You cannot and will not change. You will not improve. You will never be someone who is happy with where she is at. You will never be a hard worker. You will always be someone who gives up.” Usually, when I ask questions like that, I give myself answers like that. Throughout this project, though, I have been reflecting on who I really am, who is really hidden under the rough surface. For me, at least, it’s not, “who am I going to be? How will I change to fulfill that?” It’s, “what’s hidden underneath, and how can I help it flourish?” Because I can and I do work hard. In my gymnastics, for example, I have persevered through mental blocks and weaknesses for years and years and not once has giving up and quitting even crossed my mind.  So the real question is, how can I make this show in other aspects of my life? How can I redirect some of this dedication so that I can be more successful in other areas, therefore helping me be happier? And I think I’ve already found that answer.

Going back to the start of the school year, I started art as an elective. I had a horrible mindset going into it. I have just never been an artistic person. When we were little kids, I never did art. It was my little sister who was always painting, always making something new. At first, in art, I would get frustrated when things didn’t turn out how I wanted them.  I didn’t realize that it actually is not “practice makes perfect.” It’s “dedication and hard work makes progress.” And after winter break, after realizing this, I applied it. I was doing a painting project for art. I dedicated so much time and so much energy into that painting. I asked questions, and I got opinions from other people. I learned new things and I tried to apply every correction that someone suggested. And what I realized was, even though I was dedicating more energy, more time, and more effort, I left the class every day feeling more fulfilled and less tired than I ever did before I actually tried. I began to truly enjoy what I was doing.

Anyways, going back to all other aspects of my life, I think that the answer is that I need to find the little things within what I’m doing, and I need to focus on them. And as time goes on, I will start to enjoy more of the bigger parts, and I will start to treat everything with more care. I will be able to redirect all that hard work, all that care and dedication, into other parts of my life, like school. And as I start to feel better about those things, I will start be a happier person.

So I guess, even though I went into this saying I didn’t really know, I kind of answered the question of “who am I going to be?” in this post. I even came up with a bit of a pathway of how I might be able to get there.

I’m going to be someone that people are drawn to for her happiness and warmth. Like a bowl of soup.

With that, I’m going to bring this blog post to a close. Thank you all for reading. I hope you can step away from this post having learned at least a few of the things that I shared.

With love,

Susan

It’s A New Me!

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Hello wonderful readers, welcome back to my blog. This blog post is going to be all about a project we recently wrapped up in PGP, called New Year, New Me. I know what you’re thinking. It’s not a new year! Well, when we started this project, it was a new school year. So that basically counts. Anyways, the driving question for this project was “what strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?” So, let’s break this down.

As suggested in the driving question, in this project, we focused a lot on productivity and balance, and further in we touched on our emotional wellbeing and how the two relate. One of the first things we did for productivity was learn about how we can use the tools we have to organize what we have to do and when we have to do it. Then I began blocking off time on my calendar. Though I was already using a calendar to block my time, I still had a few things to add for the project. Here is what my calendar looked like before I put all the places I have to go into it:

In order to fully organize my time, I needed to add all of my classes. So, here is my calendar after I did that:

Along with my calendar, I needed a task manager. The task manager we used was Things! Things is an app perfect for writing down what you need to do, and checking it off once you’ve done it. In this project, I learned all about how to utilize Things to best cater to the way that I operate. Here was my Things before I started using it as an effective task manager:

As you can see, there isn’t really much there. Since then, I’ve started to use it more. Here is my Things currently:

You can see that I am now using it as a tool to keep track of everything I have to do, and I have it all specifically organized so that I know exactly what I have to do for it and can be more aware of upcoming deadlines and what I have to do. When I pair it with my calendar, I can block out the times that I need to work on specific projects. This helps me be more productive and get things done.

Another main aspect of this project was our positive brain training exercises! Every day, we had a different exercise to help us be more positive. On Mondays, we did meditation, on Tuesdays, we did a conscious act of kindness, on Wednesdays, we exercised, on Thursdays, we journaled, and on Fridays, we did a gratitude journal. The overall goal of these exercises was to improve our mood. Here is one of my favourite ones that we did:

That’s a screenshot of my love letter that I sent to my friend Gwen for a conscious act of kindness. All in all, I think all of these exercises really did improve my mood. During this project, I was looking forward to going to class to go do a little happiness exercise. I especially enjoyed the Wednesday exercises and the Monday meditations. They added some fun to the classroom and just made this whole project more enjoyable.

All in all, this project helped to improve my productivity, stay on top of my work, and be in a better mood all the time. I have kept using all of these strategies to try to keep up and even get ahead of the class work.

Thanks for reading,

Susan

Save Juno Beach!🪖

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Hey guys, welcome back to my blog! Today I’m going to be reflecting on my most recent project in Humanities, Save Juno Beach. This project was all about World War II. I learned lots about the causes and consequences of the war, and all about how the events of the war played out. Our finished product end was an academic essay. In this blog post, I am going to take a deep dive into the process it took to get me to the point where I had a finished product I was happy with. Let’s get into it!

For our first keystone, we learned all about many of the events of WWII, and then completed Kahoot quizzes to show our learning. There were 6 different Kahoots about different aspects of the war. In order to receive a proficient grade on the Kahoot quizzes, we needed to get a perfect score and get every question correct. I am happy with my learning on this keystone because I think I picked up on the facts when our teacher taught them in class, and anything that I missed, I picked up while doing the Kahoots. I feel that after this keystone, I had a strong understanding of the events that happened before, during, and after WWII.

After this, we got to work on narrowing down what we might want to include in our essay. At this point, we had still not written our thesis, so we had a wide range of options of what we could write about. In order to be able to narrow things down once we started brainstorming, we needed to strengthen our skills in determining historical significance. For this, we had a worksheet, pictured below, in which we determined the historical significance of WWII. In the worksheet, we looked at significant ways that this event could impact the world, and figured out how much that the statement applied. Here is my historical significance of WWII chart:

After we were confident in our abilities to figure out whether something was significant, we brainstormed topics for our essay. I chose to brainstorm using a useful app called MindNode. With MindNode, I could create a web of ideas branching off of one another. Here is my brainstorming:

After this, it was time to write our thesis. Here is the one I wrote: “It’s important to talk and learn about WWII because it helps people gain a better understanding of the world around them, which in turn helps them become better, educated, and more empathetic people.” I am quite happy with how my thesis turned out!

Next up, we created an rough outline for our final essays. Despite the fact that I thought I had a complete, full plan, my outline ended up being completely different than my final essay. Here is what my outline looked like:

Finally, it was time to write up my essay. I had multiple drafts, but in this blog post, I am only going to show you the final draft. Here is the link to my essay.

Overall, in this project, I think I learned lots about essay writing and researching. I am super happy with how my finished product turned out. I hope I’m able to apply these skills in other projects!

Thanks for reading,

Susan

How Can I Define Canadian Identity?

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Hey y’all, welcome back to my blog! In this post I will be talking about our most recent humanities 10 project, This is Us. In this project we learned all about Canadian identity and diversity. 

The first thing we did for this project was answering our launch question to try to dig up future inquiries about Canadian identity. The question was, “Why does it matter to think about who we are as Canadians?”

My answer was:

“I think it’s important to think about who we are as Canadians because it’s important to reflect on we are. We must think about our past, and how that differs to who we want to become. It’s important for Truth and Reconciliation to be able to acknowledge our past mistakes as Canadians. This way, we can work towards reconciliation. Without acknowledging our past, we cannot work on ourselves for the future. Canadians have a long way to go in who we are, and if we reflect on who we are and try to use that as a tool to improve for the future, we can truly thrive as a nation.”

I’m happy with the work I did on this assignment because my first draft was not my best work but I was given some feedback and I am happy with how I applied these revisions and changed my work for the better.

After that, we learned about Canadian women to practise our inquiry skills. First, we had to ask lots of “Need to know” questions. A need to know question is a question that you ask to get an answer that helps you learn more about the subject.

Here were my need to knows about Canadian women:

After we came up with our need to knows, we researched the answers to the questions and used the knowledge we learned from that in an in-class discussion about women and how they struggle as a minority. In this in-class conversation, I’m very happy with how I participated and engaged with the other students. I hope in future classroom conversations I can apply that same energy. 

Next, we created our personal inquiry driving questions. This question was a main question that we came up with to help drive our research on our topic to encourage deeper learning. We then created some need to knows to narrow down our research to ultimately answer our driving questions. We put all this on a Craft document, including notes from the actual research and writing in our sources. 

Once we finished that, we had to write up an elevator pitch talking about our research and what we learned. My elevator pitch I decided to have my elevator pitch also in the Craft document. We presented these elevator pitches to small groups in class. We presented to two different groups and each group tried to engage in conversation about the things we had learned and connect between topics. The two different groups we were put in were groups with similar topics to us, and groups with completely different topics. I talked a little more about this in my reflection journal.

We also created a reflection journal in a Craft document. This was a document to reflect on our research and inquiry, our discussions, and our human library. Here is a link to my Craft document with evidence of all of my learning.

Speaking of our human library, that was the last big thing we did in this project! A human library is an event where many “books” talk about their life experiences. For example, a “book” may be an immigrant coming in to talk about their experiences to people who haven’t had those experiences. This allows us to learn more about what it’s like to have different experiences when we haven’t had those experiences ourselves. It helps us be more empathetic and understanding towards other’s experiences and feelings.

For our human library, each of us students were expected to invite one “book.” The book that I invited was my mom. My mom immigrated from Ecuador when she was a child, and grew up facing racial discrimination in Toronto, Ontario. Through the human library, she educated a small group of people on her story. Here are some photos from the human library:

Our human library was the ultimate wrap-up to this project! I’m quite happy with my work from this project. I believe that I tried my best in all my work, and I have a deep understanding of Canadian identity by the end.

That’s all, thanks for reading!

Susan

Museums… And WWI

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Hello everybody, welcome back to my blog! This is my final post of grade 9, which is crazy to think about. It feels like just yesterday I was writing my first blog post of grade 9. Anyways, this post is all about my latest project, Dulce et Decorum Est, and the spring exhibition, where I showcased the work I did in that project.

Dulce et Decorum Est was all about World War I. We also learned about museums and how to create an exhibit. These two ideas were brought together for the exhibition, which I’ll talk about later in this post.

Our first keystone was research on museums. Part of this was a quick field trip to the Museum of North Vancouver to get a tour and talk to the people working in the museum about how the exhibits are structured and how they’re built to appeal to the audience. Here’s a picture of us at the museum:

Another major part of this keystone was looking at online resources including an article about how to make your own exhibit, an actual online exhibit, and so many more. Through all of that, we took notes about how we could use this information to create our own exhibit. Finally, we had to write a paragraph reflecting on what we learned through this research. Here’s mine:

How do museums tell stories? A proper exhibit is a compilation of thoughts and events, organized either by time period or how it’s presented. A curator can guide the audience to look through it in a certain way, and the audience still has the freedom to go through it in their own way, at their own pace. Museums tell stories by organizing thoughts and feelings through works of art or artifacts. They also explain stories behind said works of art or artifacts, allowing the audience to learn all about what the exhibit may be about. This is actively telling a story to the audience. An effective exhibit could also be interactive, where the audience can choose to use different senses other than sight, such as touch or hearing. This is vital to engage the audience so that they can be invested in the story you’re telling. These are just a few ways that museums tell stories.

I’m happy with how my paragraph turned out, even after multiple revisions. I think it accurately represents what I learned.

Our second keystone was a paragraph on the contrasting narratives of war. For this, we researched about World War I, and a lot about propaganda in war. Here’s my paragraph:

When we think of war, specifically the First World War, we think of death and pain. We think of the worst things that happened. We think of the huge numbers of lost soldiers, the horrible diseases spread, and the idea of living for years in muddy trenches. We can’t stop thinking about trench foot, families alone at home, and famine. Rarely do we think of the valuable things that came out of it. We forget how good it was for the economy, and how white women got more rights out of it, thanks to so many amazing female nurses who contributed to the war. We forget about the technological advancements. Part of the reason that we forget these things is that we have to respect the people that went through the hard, treacherous parts of the war. In that, we forget all of the important good things, because the two contrast each other so much. They are so far apart on the spectrum of good and bad it’s almost like we can only choose one to talk about. Women getting the right to vote is so far away from the 8.5 million soldiers lost. It’s hard to believe they even happened on the same planet, let alone at the same time. It definitely demonstrates great contrast.

I’m satisfied with how this paragraph turned out. I don’t think it was my greatest work, but I definitely could’ve done worse and I think it’s still pretty good.

Our third and final keystone was our museum exhibit. This was the exhibit we put up for the exhibition, and I was really happy with how it turned out. I chose to do a painting that represented poetry made from WWI, following our theme of creation and destruction, choosing the creation side. Choosing to do a painting is not something I would naturally do. I’m not super artistic, and painting isn’t a strong suit of mine. But I decided I wanted to try something new, something out of my comfort zone. While my finished product may not look as great as I wanted it to, I’m glad I tried something new. I set up my big painting on the wall, writing out the poem “In Flanders Field” next to it, and recruiting Evangeline to help me draw poppies around it. Here’s what my exhibit looked like:

That’s it! See you in grade 10,

Susan

tPOL Time!

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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.

It’s that tPOL time of year again! I think I’ve changed a lot over the past semester, and I’ve made some discoveries about myself as a learner.

Last semester, for my mPOL, I talked a lot about how I had improved from grade 8 by doing most of my work in class and being able to keep from stressing about it and letting it impact my life outside of school. Now, looking back on the whole year, I can confidently tell you that the second semester did not work out as well as the first.

At the start of this semester, I went to Mexico for a gymnastics competition. I was only gone from school for two days but it impacted two entire projects. I missed the launch of Frankenstuffies, and I was already behind. We were expected to almost be done our stuffy, but I barely knew what the assignment was. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, because I would’ve had lots of extra time to catch up. Instead, I let it get to my head.

This semester, I discovered that I cannot let myself fall behind, because if I do, I let it snowball and suddenly I’m a whole project behind. For Frankenstuffies and Building a Nation, I was constantly a step or two behind.

You might be asking, “what do you mean by letting your work snowball”? Well, what happens is I get all stressed over it even though I’m barely behind, and because I’m stressed, I start procrastinating getting my work done, and suddenly two days behind turns into two weeks behind.

How did I solve this problem? Well, by the time we got to the end of Building a Nation, I was only a few days behind. So when the weekend between it and the next project, I got down to business. I finished everything and went into Dulce Et Decorum Est with a fresh mindset, ready to enjoy the project like I did with other projects in the first semester.

How can I prevent this happening in the future? I think it’s important for me to fix my mindset. I need to stop having this idea that doing my work at home is harder, or slower, or impossible. I need to be able to take it home and have it be just as good as at school. That way, if I miss a day for whatever reason, I don’t get so completely, helplessly behind.

That was a bit of a downer, but now that I know this about myself, we can look to a future where I’m on top of my work all the time. We can also look at my accomplishments from this year.

First off, I was really proud of my book from the Power of Geography project for humanities last semester. I put a lot of thought into it and also spent some time making it look good, and I really think it turned out well. I think it was one of the best things I worked on this year. I also thoroughly enjoyed doing it, and I was actually invested on how it went, which included putting some real thought into it. Here are some of my favourite pages from it:

I’m also really happy with all the photos I put into it.

Something else that I’m really proud of that’s more recent was my final product in our project called Building a Nation. It was a board game representing Nationalism and the history of the Confederation of Canada. I found the project pretty interesting and I enjoyed making a board game. This is what the finished product of our board game looked like:

Finally, we had our World War I project, which we put on show for the exhibition. For this, I painted a mural to represent poetry created in WWI. I mostly wanted to do a painting to step out of my comfort zone, as I’m not a super artistic person and don’t usually do things like paint. I’m happy with how my painting turned out, even though it definitely could’ve been better if I had more experience painting. But I think I ended up getting what I wanted, which was trying something new for a project. Here’s what my piece looked like:

That’s a wrap of my 2023 tPOL! Thank you for coming/reading my post!

We Played Board Games For A Month

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Hello, and welcome back to my blog! It’s definitely been a while since I’ve posted a blog post, but it’s nice to be back. 

This last project was about nationalism and Confederation. We started with a simulation! In this we simulated the Confederation of Canada.

When our class simulated Confederation, I learned a lot about Canada’s history. I was leading the colony of New Brunswick with Evangeline, Charlie R, and Jasper. Together, we decided on things to demand of confederation. In the end, most of our needs were met, so we decided to sign and join confederation! Unfortunately, not everyone joined confederation, because not every colony’s needs were met. PEI and Nova Scotia decided not to, because not all their needs could be met because they were both so small with such big demands. For example, PEI wanted to remove taxes for all their farmers, which is a very big ask for such a small colony. The big colonies, on the other hand, benefited greatly, because they were granted a lot of political power and got more of their demands met. Our colony had quite a few demands, and we purposely made some that we didn’t care much about so that we could use them as bargaining chips. In the end, we had everything we wanted, because we made it seem like we had the Capitol taken away from us when really we didn’t want it that bad. By the end of the simulation I realized that I would absolutely hate being in political power. Confederation involved a lot of big decisions made with stubborn people, and it was a lot of work for a few decisions about our country. I did realize how important these decisions were, though, which is something I never thought of before the simulation.

The simulation was our first keystone. Our second keystone was a board game proposal.

Basically, for this whole project, we were building towards the finish line of a playable board game about Confederation, showcasing our learning about nationalism and Confederation. I was somewhat excited about this, but also afraid that I would be setting myself up for disappointment in the board game and it wouldn’t turn out the way I wanted it to. Luckily, my partner for the board game was Evangeline, and she helped to make the Confederation board game of our dreams!

Our proposal was a game called The Colonies of Confederation, and in it you can take historical perspective on the leaders of the different colonies as you try to come up with confederation and agree with the other people. In our proposal, there was also a timeline that we would aim for, trying to complete different parts of the game by certain days. I think we were mostly able to stick to the timeline, which is great. We were able to describe how our game showed nationalism by showing how people must come together and have shared beliefs or needs in order to become a nation.

Finally, the third keystone was the rules of our board game. Through this, we showed our learning in our introduction to the game, showcasing what nationalism is and how Confederation reflected it. We were also able to easily explain how to play our game, using understandable, descriptive language and also using our graphic design skills to make it set the mood and be possible to read. Here are our rules:

Here’s a picture of our board game:

After that, one of the grade 8 classes came and played our games with us!

Throughout this project, I learned a lot about Confederation and nationalism. Before this project, I didn’t even know what nationalism was! But now I know all about how it can connect people through different beliefs, races, experiences, and more. I think that the idea of nationalism is really important to who we are as people, and I think it’s a really cool concept.

See you in the next project,

Susan