Hey everyone! This blog post is my reflection for our project about the Outsiders. This project was CRAZY but it was really cool. When I first heard we were reading a book for school I was a little nervous because I usually read Fantasy books and I don’t think many schools will assign a Fantasy book to read. But I ended up really liking this book, it was fast paced and action packed. This was my first big exhibition (I’ve done one before but it was only with PLP 8). This winter exhibition was really crazy, we stayed at school after 3:00 to get ready for it. But i’ll talk more about that later. Our driving question for this project was: “what can the Outsiders teach us about worldview?” Throughout the project we worked to answer that question. We started by learning about what worldview is. So what is it? Worldview by definition is: a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. Worldview was a very important part of this project, no mater what we always came back to the idea of how our worldview affects the situation were in. We started learning about worldview through making a MindNode about our personal worldview. The seven aspects of worldview are: Geography, Time, Beliefs, Society, Values, Economy, Knowledge. Here’s my MindNode explaining my worldview: 
In a normal project we would usually use the milestone system but, in this project we decided to do something a little different. Instead of using milestones (the little diamond emoji) we used Keystones. Are the building blocks for this project. If we missed one of the Keystones then the project would fall apart. Our 3 Keystones were; ‘What would The Outsiders look like today?’ ‘How does worldview impact who we are?’ And ‘How can I act like an “Outsider”?’
While we started learning about worldview we also started reading the book. Every class we’d come to class with question prepared for our book discussion here’s some of my favourite questions from our book discussions that I thought of: from ch. 6 – why do you think it took so long for Pony to realize that Darry cares about him? From ch. 1 – what do you think the book would be like from a different characters perspective?
During our reading we also paid a lot of attention to the characters and their traits and personalities. We even made a Keynote for it, here it is:
There were two sort of general parts to this project. One was reading (obviously) and one was acting so, in order to prepare for the acting portion we played some improv games! If you didn’t know I love acting and so I really enjoyed playing these improv games the first one we played was: splat, Next we played: freeze!, then we played: charades, then: body parts, then: frog in the pond, lastly: heads up heads down. If you want to learn how to play these games then just click the one you want to play to go to the instructions.
Part of getting to know the characters was figuring out their worldviews and personality traits. So we we chose a character from the book and wrote about their personality traits and how those personality traits influenced their worldview. We called it You vs. Who character analysis, here’s mine: Character Trait Investigation – The Outsiders (Johnny)
Now that we finished reading the book (it was soooooooo good) we stated to analyze the plot, we did this by filling out a storytelling graphic organizer which helped separate different parts of the story into 5 sections; Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action and Conclusion. Here it is: Outsiders Storytelling Graphic Organizer
So we finished the book, we understand the plot, we understand the characters. Now what? Well…. Now we put our AMAZING! Acting skills to the test by making a movie trailer for The Outsiders (insert crowed cheering noises). My group and I (everyone’s blogs will be linked at the bottom of the post) created the trailer and called it the Insiders here it:
Wow, we have done a lot of things now, it’s time to start pre-preparing for the exhibition by creating Individual movie posters!🎉🎉🎉 In these movie posters we were asked to include one element of worldview in our poster I decided to include Geography, here’s the actual explanation straight from Showbie; “In this poster for the outsiders, I wanted to show how geography affects my character. In this poster I’m playing Ponyboy as he is sitting on the steps of the church looking at the sunset. I wanted to highlight the sadness in my body language. This reflects geography because Ponyboy was sad that the only place he could safely stay at was a run down old church that was probably about to collapse. It also shows that Ponyboy doesn’t have many options when it come to living situations. That impacts his worldview because he never feels completely secure, he always is on edge about his house.” Here’s the poster I created: 
After everyone had create their individual movie poster we took a look at all of them and critiqued them. Now it was time to create the group movie poster so, we took photos of everyone in the group and then everyone created an individual group poster. Then we critiqued them and decided which we likes best and used that one for the exhibition.
This is our group poster: 
We’ve done a lot of work and everyone needs a break so we decided to watch the outsiders movie. Wow it was not what I was expecting, most of the movies I’ve watched have been incredibly different from their book but the outsiders got it spot on. The only plot differences were so small you had to squint to see them. The biggest difference from the movie and the book was the characters and even those were pretty good. Watching the movie felt like reading the book all it was missing was some of Ponyboy’s thoughts.
Ahhhhhh! The winter exhibition is getting closer. We better get planning our Tableau’s, wait, wait, wait I didn’t explain what a tableau is – a tableau is where participants make still images with their bodies to represent a scene. alright back to planning first we gotta figure out what scene from the book were doing and plan a rough draft. Here’s what we came up with: 
Tableau Scene Pitch Form
Alright. We have a baseline now we need to figure out the little details and who’s saying what and when their saying it. Then we practice, practice, practice our Tableau.
So far our Tableau is set in the 1960s (which is when the Outsiders is based) but we need to transpose it into 2021. How did we do that you ask well, I’ll show you: Tableau Script Planner
First dress rehearsal has arrived (dun, dun, dunnnnnnnn) we all got into our costumes and rehearsed like it was the actual performance. After that we realized we had a lot to do especially with the set. So we did a second dress rehearsal in the space we were going to perform in. This one went a lot better than the first but we realized we didn’t have that much space also there were books shelf’s we have to cover up with sheets so that was the next step – bring sheets. After we rehearsed with the sheets and set and costumes we were gold (haha get it. It’s a quote from the book if you didn’t get it).
Now the whole class was getting everything ready (that wasn’t for their tableau) to be put in the library. E.g. cutting out arrows to put on the ground and making a worldview sign.
Exhibition Day. It’s here. PLP 8&9’s first big exhibition, PLP 8 got a bit of head start with the setting up which I can say from experience is very nice to have. It was chaos setting everything up and through the chaos Ms Willemse managed to lose her glasses. There was a full blown manhunt to find them but, you wont guess where they were I’ll give you a second to guess… ok they were in a pile of wires. You read it right -wires- but they were found and thats all that matters. Here’s a quick Timelapse of my group and I setting everything up: IMG_3176
After the set up which included moving everything possible out of the library we finally got to perform here’s a video of us performing unfortunately there’s no sound because my mom who was filming (thank you by the way mom!) accidentally filmed the performance in slow mo, so I had to speed it up don’t ask me how I did it I won’t be able to explain it:
Extra photos from the exhibition.
This exhibition was super fun, it was amazing seeing all my friends work so hard to create something so cool. I just really wish I could have been there for the entire exhibition. I’m super excited to see what grade 9 brings for the winter exhibition!
Here’s all my group’s blogs:
Happy Holidays and have a fantastic New Year!
Thanks for reading -Sydney🙃