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Month: June 2024

2024 TPOL

2024 TPOL

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TPOL 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.

TPOL 2024

Only a day left of grade 8! Can you believe it? 

As I look back on this year, I am amazed at how much I’ve grown not just as a learner but as a person. This year has been a drastic change in almost all aspects of my life, I have had to navigate through so many new experiences, and it is these experiences that have prepared me for grade 9. 

How can I showcase evidence to demonstrate that PLP success behaviours have prepared you to advance to the next grade?  This is the question I am basing my TPOL on. We were given a checklist to evaluate ourselves on the behaviours we show consistently, sometimes, and rarely, here are my answers:

I have chosen three success behaviours to focus on: agency, communication and collaboration, and self-regulation

Agency

First, I want to highlight my success in accepting feedback and making revisions. Revision is something that was a very big shock and struggle for me at the beginning of the year. My whole school career I have required everything I do to be perfect. Because of this I often hyper fixate on projects and work long and hard on them to make them perfect. 

The first project I ever did in PLP was the ‘It’s the End of the World’ project where we had to rewrite the song It’s the End of The Word as we Know it in a way that displays our worldview. I worked long nights in making my song perfect. After doing this I was introduced to PLP’s Idea of how everything can be revised. After working so hard to make a ‘flawless’ song I was asked  to change it. My immediate reaction was “NO!” I remember sitting on the table at home just staring at my song, my brain refusing to revise.

During my most recent project ‘The Wilderness Must be Explored’ I created an advertisement that I handed in. I later got feedback on how I could improve and revise my ad. Unlike the beginning of the year I fixed it up without struggle.

This is an example of how much PLP has helped me with my perfectionism, which is a ongoing struggle I have always faced.

 

Communication and Collaboration with Peers

Because of the many group projects in PLP, I have had to communicate and collaborate a lot this year, which has made me very aware on how much I have to work on it. 

I am a good group member when it comes to actively participating and doing work, however sometimes I participate to much. My perfectionism causes me to have a hard time trusting other people with creating work that is up to my standards which leads me to end up doing all of the work.

Here is the participation pie I created after the ‘It’s the End of the World’ project:

Although my communication and collaboration skills have grown over this past year, this is still a skill I continue to struggle with and I would like to focus on it as something to improve in grade 9.

Self-Regulation

Self regulation is something I have been struggling a lot with this year. I am a very busy person and have several commitments out of school, because of this I often find it hard to balance school and sports which leads me to often be very stressed. My stress is also an out come of my time management skills, I don’t have a hard time staying on task during school. However when I am trying to get work done at home, staying focused is hard. 

A project where I really struggled with self-regulation was the Echoes of colonization project. During this project I was in the middle of the high school mountain bike team and was frequently missing class. This lead to a lot of homework as well as a lot of procrastinating.

I am not very proud of this project, I was very rushed in doing it, and not a very present group member. 

In the future, when I miss school or have homework, I am going to have set times to do the work. This could be in the car to a mountain bike race, or just a time at home where my phone or any distractions are away.

Goals For Grade 9

This year has taught me so much about who I am as a learner and as a person. Moving onto grade 9 I want to continue to work on improving my perfectionism, I will do this by focusing on getting the work done, and then making it better or revising it after. As I continue to work on my perfectionism, I believe my teamwork skills will improve. However, I still want to work on my teamwork by going out of my comfort zone and trusting my peers. 

How am I Prepared For Grade 9

This year I have improved as a learner. I have made goals and strived to meet them. Although I have overcome so many challenges this year, I still have work to do. Having reflected on my year as well as created goals and how i am going to reach them, I have prepared myself for all of the challenges I will face in grade 9. I have a game plan and wont stop until I have become the best learner I can be.

Advertising Adventure

Advertising Adventure

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Imagine yourself lying on the warm sandy shore of a beautiful beach in Oregon. Your toes running through the soft sand, the salty air brushing through your hair, the soothing sound of waves crashing gently against the shore. 

You want to Oregon now, don’t you? Isn’t it crazy how just and sequence of words strung together can make you dream of going somewhere or doing something? This Is called advertising. I have spent the last 2 months learning about, working on, and creating advertisements.

The Project

This project was full of a lot of learning and assignments that all lead up to creating a advertisement campaign for Oregon to display at the spring exhibition, all while trying to answer the driving question, how does language inspire adventure?

To create the campaign we worked in groups of 5 where we were given the theme connection with nature. We then had to find a font, a colour scheme, we had to create a logo,  we had to each create our own individual ads, we had to create a video ad, and we had to put our logo on merchandise.

I created the video advertisement for the group and it is something I am very proud of. It was an original idea, and I believe I was very creative and successful in making people want to go to Oregon and connect with nature.

My Answer to the Driving Question

If you decide to go on an adventure, you would have had to have learned about it, or heard about it somewhere. These are both things acquired with language. The language in an advertisement, when your friend talks about an experience, the language on a social media post these are all examples of using words or photos to convince or inspire someone to go on an adventure. Also, language is often used to down play the negative and up play the positive, it can use words to make something sound way better than it actually is. It can be very persuasive and used in ways to convince somebody to go.

What Helped me Get There

Adventure Week

In order to create a campaign advertising Oregon, PLP 8 went on a field study to Oregon. Because of personal reasons I couldn’t go. Instead, I had an adventure week in school. I was assigned with cresting an adventure book documenting all of the adventures I went on, I want to go on, and that I researched. This assignment really helped me get a good grasp on what an adventure is, as well as helped me improve my advertising skills.

Read my book here:

Quarry Rock Advertisement 

Another thing that helped me answer the driving question was creating my quarry rock advertisement. This was the first stab at creating Ads that I took and it was the thing that helped me understand what makes a good advertisement. When I first handed in the Ad I got feedback on what I had to revise, I was told to make it less cluttered and more simple. This feedback helped me throughout the project as it was something I kept in mind as I created my campaign.

Exhibition Reflection

Once we finished our campaign, it was time to share our work to the public at the spring exhibition. We needed our campaign to be more engaging for the people watching. We decided to create a walking garden. We cut out cardboard squares, drew empty vases on them, and then poked holes above the drawing. We gave the cardboard vases to people looking at our campaign. They had to go through each station learn about Oregon, get a flower at each station, and then Boom! They would not only finish with a finished flower bouquet but also having gained knowledge about Oregon. 

I believe the exhibition went well, we all had our individual jobs that played off of our strengths. 

F.A.I.L (first attempts in learning)

If I were to do anything in this project over again, I would change how our exhibition display looked. I don’t think it was very aesthetic and I believe we could have spent more time decorating the tables.

What I learned

Through this project, I learned how to make a persuasive and effective advertisement in order to convince someone to go on an adventure. I thought about my values of a good and adventurous time, which lead me to discover how special and interesting the ocean is to me. I had an adventure with a new book genre and learned I really enjoy reading adventure books. I learned abut a new food and tasted something I would have never tried otherwise. I listened to other peoples adventure experiences, which taught me more about what adventure is. I learned all the steps of how to make an advertisement campaign. Also, I improved my public speaking skills while doing the exhibition.

There is an Army Inside my Body?

There is an Army Inside my Body?

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What if I told you there is an entire army living inside your body. That’s right, there is so much more happening inside you then you may think. When you are sick, while you’re lying down, sleeping and watching movies all day, your immune system is in action fighting for your health.

Over the past month, we have been learning about cell biology and the immune system, we learned about the cell theory and types of cells, the basic functions of the immune system, and vaccinations, all while trying to answer the driving question, how does our knowledge of cell biology contribute to public health?

My Answer to the Driving Question

Our health as a society relies greatly on doing our own individual parts, wether that’s washing your hands, or staying home when your sick, or getting a vaccine, all of these actions are the reasons we are a relatively healthy group of people. Our understanding of cell biology is the reason we have discovered all of these tactics to keep ourself’s healthy. If we didn’t know anything about why we get sick we wouldn’t know anything about how to prevent getting sick. Knowing about bad bacteria and how our immune system works is allowing us to perfectly create things to eliminate viruses without causing excess damage, keeping our overall public health clean, safe and healthy.

How Did I Get There

Swabbing the School Field Journal

Something that helped me answer the driving question was swabbing the school and creating a field journal for it. In this assignment we were assigned with creating a question that could be answered by swabbing the school. I was curious about which water fountain in the school had the least bacteria. We then had to create a hypothesis and prediction. I thought that the downstairs water fountain had the least bacteria because it is tucked away in a place with little classrooms, therefore it is used less. However, when I swabbed all of the water fountains, and, over the span of 2 weeks, observed the bacteria I came to the conclusion that the middle floor #1 water fountain had the least bacteria and the downstairs had the most. Through this project I learned a lot about how to conduct an experiment, I learned about bacteria, and I improved my design skills while creating my keynote.

Read my field journal here

Character Cards

Creating immune system character cards was the thing that helped me answer the driving question the most. We had to create character cards for the different immune cells in the immune  system. We had to personify them as if they were characters in the story of our immune system and describe their roles and functions within the body in protecting us from unwanted invaders. I decided to turn the cells into the Simpson characters. I learned a lot through this activity because it forced me to research a lot about the immune cells and write a description that anybody can understand. This made me understand how all of the cells work together which makes it easy to understand how vaccines and other tactics that we do to keep us healthy work. 

Media Campaign

Another thing that helped me answer the driving question is the media campaign. I created 3 media posts about vaccines and the public perception of them. I decided to do my posts about  how some people think vaccines cause autism. I reaserched a lot about this idea and came to the conclusion that vaccines do not cause autism. This assignment taught me about how the public’s perception of vaccines effect public health. I also learned about bias and how important it is to consider all perspectives. 

F.A.I.L (First Attempt In Learning)

If I were going to do this project again, I would take more time to do my media posts. While creating them, I was very rushed and did not take enough time to really create a clever and understandable post. I would come up with better headings and make each post more different from one another.

What Did I Learn

At the beginning of this project we were asked to write down everything we knew about cells, and I had absolutely no knowledge of cells at all.

Now that we are done, I am very knowledgeable and easily understand how cells work together to keep us healthy. Through this long process, I learned how our immune cells (T-cells, B-Cells, Macrophages, White blood cells, and Anti-bodies) work together to eliminate pathogens to keep our body and overall public health healthy. I learned about bad bacteria and what happens when it enters our body. I learned how to conduct an experiment and improved my keynote design skills. I learned what vaccines are and how they work. I also learned about the public’s perception of vaccines. I learned about bias, and how to do research in order to consider all perspectives.

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