Tpol 2024, Goodbye Grade 10!

Wow has this been a long year! So much has changed and I feel like I have learned so much more this year than any other year before.

“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.”

Agency

Agency is the sense of control that you have over yourself, your sense of independence and ability to have responsibility over your actions. I chose to focus on this subject because to me it feels like one of the most important characteristics to have and work on. I feel that I exc el at some parts of having Agency but I also struggle in some parts. In this section I feel that I am consistent in taking responsibility for my own learning and actions, setting goals and self assessing and accepting feedback and making revisions. What I need to work on firstly, is seeking help from my teachers when I don’t understand a topic, I usually go to my friends and peers when I need help, but it would also be beneficial to go to my teachers more often too. Secondly I need work on providing my work on time/earlier, this will give me time to make revisions if needed and hopefully will help me boost my grade from a %90 to an %100. Lastly I need to work on showing more resilience, I tend to find myself giving up when projects get hard or when I don’t understand something.

Communication and Collaboration

I wanted to focus on this success behavior because this is the behavior that I have put the most time and effort into working on over the entire course of my high school career. But this is the year I think I have taken the biggest stride and made the most progress. In this proficiency I succeed with being a reliable team member and providing feedback for my classmates. I need to work on communication with my teachers and staying on task with my iPad. I’m not terrible with either of these things but there is definitely room for improvement.

Self Regulation

The last proficiency I’m going to talk about is self regulation. In this proficiency I feel that I succeed in setting boundaries and having good balance between my school work, personal life and extra curricular activities. I also feel that I succeed at identifying sources of stress and being able to cope with them. Where I need to work on, is my focus, as I said in the last section, I can sometimes find myself getting distracted, especially when I’m sitting in class with my friends. Iv’e decided that if I need to get a lot of work done then next year I’m going to start finding another place to work to help eliminate any distractions.

My Top 3 projects of the year

I based these of not which ones I necessarily enjoyed the most but the ones where I learned the most and feel like I grew my skills the most from.

Romeo? Romeo!

This is by far one of the projects that I expected to go the worst for me, because I knew that we would be doing some form of acting which is something that I dislike to do and I consider myself extremely bad at. Despite that this ended up being a project I enjoyed doing even if I found it difficult at first. The products that we ended up with were way above my expectations and I’m proud to have presented the video we created.

Cray Cray Yay Yay

This project we went to Seattle for and created a PechaKucha that we presented to our parents. My PechaKucha was on Music of Seattle. This project was something I felt very uncomfortable with and made me feel very stressed because public speaking is something that I struggle a lot with. The reason that I put it up here is because I learned so incredibly much about public speaking over this entire project. It has made other speaking projects feel so much easier to do because I’ve learned the process in which I personally need to get prepared to feel comfortable and do the best to my abilities.

Back to the future

This project taught me so much about myself, It made me think about my skills, weaknesses, my habits and my personality. It really taught me about my learning habits and what I need to grow on as a person. This project also helped me start to feel empowered in my skills and gave me more confidence in both my school life and home life.

Honorable Mentions: Pea’s in a Podcast

Success’s

Communication

The growth of my communication skills has been a big success for me. I feel so much more comfortable doing group projects now and I feel that I have significantly improved on doing my part and even more in groups. Before I used to feel so uncomfortable taking any form of a leadership role but now I feel able to if needed and Im going to try to work on that more next year.

Understanding myself

This year we have done so many projects where we have to delve into our personal characteristics, habits and personalities. We’ve had three projects that fully focus on us. New Year New me, Back to the Future and Who Are You Gonna Be? These projects are one of the main reasons that I decided to join PLP because I wanted to focus on not only what I was learning in class throughout school but also what I was learning about myself throughout school, because High school is the times when we grow the most as people.I have not only learned about my flaws and fails as a person but I have learned what makes me great and unique, which sometimes all of us need to be reminded of.

Failures

Being aware of how we fail is such a difficult thing for so many people, but it’s also so important to think about. When we think about our failures is gives us a chance to change and improve. So I’m going to talk about some of my biggest F.A.I.L.’s this year (First attempt in learning).

Punctuality

Being on time is personally what I think my biggest fail this year is. I struggled handing in assignments on time and I found myself procrastinating a lot this year, especially getting closer to the breaks when I was becoming burnt out. I need to get better at balancing my down time with my work time, because I found myself working very hard and succeeding at lot at the beginning of the year and after breaks but as the year on my work and preparation would go down on a decline. Next year Im going to work on my overall consistency over large periods of time.

Thanks for listening to my TPol and I can’t wait for a great next year!! See you in Grade 11!!

My path of self discovery 💡

This project gave me the time and resources I need to get to really know myself on a deeper level. Through out this project I’ve learned so many qualities about myself that have helped me grow my overall confidence in day to day life. Understanding things like my personality type and main features has helped me plan out a future that I can fully see myself happily living in. I’ve realized the importance of growing your skills and working on your weaknesses when you younger and still have many chances to make mistakes and grow from them at every corner in your life.

During this self discovery path I did many activities and learned so much about myself. I narrowed down my goals and creating a set of paths that I am going to follow to complete my dreams both close (like getting my drivers license, saving up money for further education) and far (like becoming a biomedical engineer and traveling the world). Writing down my goals and getting to physically see them has helped me see what I need to focus one in my life. I want to start working which is why I’m glad that we created a resumè for this project, I got to create something that I am going to use in the real world.

If you have ever heard of a show called Shark Tank then you may recognize the activity we did. Each of us had to present a pitch to a panel of people (1 or 2 community members) but unlike shark tank we presented ourselves as potential candidates for an organization or workplace, during a 7 minute pitch. While preparing this pitch I found myself diving even deeper into my hobbies and interests and how they affect me as a person. I started off my pitch with a brief introduction of myself and then went on to talk about my main selling points. Making this pitch taught me a lot about how I work under high pressure situations.

This was a project that stressed me out a lot because I struggle with public speaking so I spent a lot of time preparing my speech. I wrote myself cue cards and repeated my speech over and over in my head, but when the time came I still was terrified. I was convinced that I was going to mess up. The moment I got in front of the panel and I started speaking I felt the fear melt away. I knew my material well enough that I could just speak.

Pitch

I got a lot of good feedback from my panel member. I learned about how I need to present myself (good posture, nice clothes, look presentable) and I need to speak clearly. It’s important to find a good balance between having no confidence and having too much confidence, be able to talk about your weakness along with your strengths. I tried to do this by saying how I was going to improve upon my weaknesses and how the job could help me grow. Overall this experience has really helped me grow my confidence especially in professional settings and in front of potential employers.

Echoes of Seattle: A PechaKucha Tale

Walking onto the stage, I felt a rush of nerves mixed with excitement. My PechaKucha presentation was about to begin, and I was ready to dove into stories with the audience behind Seattle’s famous music scene. From the grunge sounds of Nirvana to the beginning of Sub Pop Records, and even the Climate Pledge Arena’s commitment to sustainability, I was excited to show how these “crazy ones” have made their mark on all aspects of the world.

You might be wondering, what is a Pecha Kucha? A Pecha Kucha is a fast presentation where you show 20 pictures and talk about each one for only 20 seconds. In a Pecha Kucha you aren’t allowed to use text it’s about finding the right images to get your point across to the audience. We worked together in groups of 3-5 to create a Pecha Kucha and presented them to our parents in a mini exhibition.

My group members: Keaton, Cameron, Frankie

We started of this project with our trip to Seattle. In Seattle we got to tour many different “crazy places” such as the climate pledge areana and a Boeing factory. In Seattle we built our knowledge on out topics. My groups topic was Seattle sounds so I focuses on places like the Museum of Pop Culture (Mpop) and the Climate Pledge Areana (which hosts many famous artists). During the trip we had to document photos that our groups could use in our Pecha Kucha. Here are some of the best photos I took during the trip

The first step to creating our Pecha Kucha was choosing the main topics that we wanted to get across to the audience. We decided to focus on Nirvanas impact on Grunge music, the Climate Pledge Arenas environmental sustainability and how the music industry has impacted Seattles economy.

Then we created slides to convey our points and go along with our speech.

On March 14th it was the night of the Pecha Kucha and I had my main points memorized, I was feeling some nerves but overall I was confident in what our group had created. Many things went well for our group, we were able to get through the presentation without forgetting anything and the timing lined up almost perfectly. We definitely could have improved on a lot of things, if we had practiced together more beforehand it would have made the whole Pecha Kucha feel cleaner and less blocky and improvised, I also feel that we could have improved on our image quality, lots of the photos we had were pixelated or didn’t fit with what we were talking about.

Overall I was extremely suprised with how I did, I expected to stutter and forgot my lines but I was able to create something I ended up being proud of, especially because public speaking is not one of my strengths. Thanks for reading my blog, have a great evening!

Destination imagination 2024

We recently started destination imagination (D.I). Our group name Cataclysmic Catapults.

We did many things well, some of the best parts of our overall soloution I would say, the story and the background. The story was clear and easy to follow while also being creative. We also had art as one of our team choice elements and used our skills for the background of our performance.

Me and Monica worked on the background and the team choice elements while Nate and Adam worked on the machine and Ronan and Callum did the script. We split the work evenly among the group to ensure all the work got done in time and that we all had a role to play.

There were many things that we needed to improve on, first of all we need to improve on how our machine launches, it was fairly unsuccessful only launching a couple of centimetres when we predicted it would go almost a few feet. The machine also was to big and therefore none of the points counted towards our final score.

I learned a lot from this experience that I could benefit from when we present in the provincials. I learned a lot about how to system works and how I will have to nagavigte from room to room. I also learned that teamwork is extremely important and that we needed to communicate more because we split up the work.

Overall we scored 4th place which was disappointing but it gave us a chance to learn what we needed to improve on. Hopefully in the provincials we’ll do better and be able to impress the judges.

Dear future me…

Who do I want to be?

This is a question that doesn’t have one answer. It is a question whose answer will change through time and circumstance.

At the moment I live life as a teenager and student. I want to do well in school and have fun with my friends. I want to enjoy this time and spend time with my family.

When I look forward I dream of living a life filled with travel, adventure and learning. Where I meet new people and challenge myself to do new things and exert independence. I want to grow and challenge myself. I want to take a gap year and travel through Europe. I want to go to university and start learning the skills I need for my career.

To do these things I need to be a person who is brave and strong, confident and kind. I need to reflect on who I am and what I want. I need to learn my strengths and weaknesses and learn how to shore up those weaknesses with knowledge. I need to find people who I admire and emulate the traits that I admire.

I want to be a person who can take risks and be successful and also be kind.

Someone that inspires me is a man I read about in The Sun Does Shine called Anthony Ray Hinton, he was a man who was falsely accused of murder (because he was black) and sentenced to death row. Despite all that had happened to him he stayed true to his belief’s, he stayed kind and decided to help the people around them. He started a book club to help his fellow inmates find a little bit of joy, a flicker of light in the dark. After 30 years of fighting, he finally won and got out of death row, but at the same time had lost the most precious thing.

The reason that I was so inspired by him is because even in his darkest moments, he refused to act like anything but himself. He refused to act like a killer because he wasn’t one, he refused to stop helping the people around him even when they were in hell on earth. He had lots of grit and perseverance and those are the characteristics that I want to strive for.

Another person that I inspire to be like is my granny. I had an interview with her where she talked about her life, she’s very active and I inspire to be like her when I grow older. I wrote about the highlights of our interview and gave reasons to why she inspires me.

In the first clip my granny is telling me about how she ran a 5k in her late 60’s. I found this inspiring because when people get older their health and fitness usually declines significantly. My granny has put in time and effort to staying fit and healthy into her older ages.

In the second clip my granny describes some of her experience growing up after World War II. I found this inspiring because even when her childhood was probably significantly harder for her than people in this generation she still talked about her experience in a positive way and not about how it negativity affected her.

In the third clip my granny’s talking about how the principal of the school wanted her to come back quickly after having a child. This makes me think that she was extremely high valued at her job and she was one of the best teachers. I find it inspiring that she found a job that suits her so well and she excels at while still enjoying it and being able to live her outside life without it interfering. I want to find a job that I enjoyed as much as my granny liked hers.

In the last clip my granny is telling me about her busy schedule and what she does with her life even after being retired. I strive to be have this kind of active lifestyle that my granny has. Instead of just staying in her house all the time she likes to keep herself busy with friends and community activities even though she is getting older (Almost 80 now). She talks about how she is helping out people at the community centre and likes to drive people around. She also told me about her hobbies like gardening, and walking in her local park. I inspire to have this positive mentality on life even as I grow in age.

While doing this project everyday, we would all wrote something we’re grateful for on a post it note and we would stick it on a window. I realized that many things in my life I take for granted, I live an extremely lucky life and I need to think about what I’m grateful for more often. The post-it window ended up looking so good in our class room, it was a pop of colour and kindness.

Thank you for reading and dear future me, I hope you completed all your goals and are living your fullest life.

Tantalus (Winter Exhibition 2023❄️)

Memorials are used as a public memory, to remember and honor a past event, or influential person. Our class started off this project by discussing some notable memorials and we learned how to analyze the different aspects (size, shape, colours, symbology, placement, location) and thought that went behind the design. Some memorials that we talked about were Mount Rushmore, Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Holocaust memorial.

Using our newfound knowledge on the aspects of memorials we designed our own memorials out of Lego. I created my lego memorial to honour the memory of the people who died on the SS. Mendi. I didn’t have all the lego pieces I needed to create my vision so I used mark-up to add the details that I couldn’t achieve with lego.

Before mark-up

After mark-up

Some of the main features that I added to my memorial were, buckets full of water that empty in the morning and refill throughout the day and night. It also will span the length of the SS. Mendi ship. I wrote a paragraph going into greater detail of my memorial. I composed details of the tragedy of the sinking of the SS. Mendi which would be included on a plaque. Paragraph link.

We used the knowledge that we gained designing individual memorials to work on creating a memorial within a group. The class was spilt into 9 groups, and I worked with Sophia and Charlie (You can visit there blogs here and here). Each group had to research and create a memorial for either South Asia (specifically the Punjab region), Japan or China. My group got assigned South Asia. We each contributed our own individual creation, and we collaborated as a group on one memorial that represented the Komagata Maru.

My individual creation was a poster on the pushes and pulls of immigration of Sikhs to Canada. I brainstormed 12 main pushes and pulls and then provided further detail on a couple of them.

Some of the information that I included in my poster is below:

Pulls for Sikhs to come to Canada.

Labour

Agriculture

Political stability

Economic benefits

More freedom

Presence of established Sikh communities

Pushes for Sikhs to leave India.

Economic Hardships

Political instability

Religious persecution

Lack of opportunities

Overpopulation

Discrimination

For our group memorial we started by doing research on the Komagata Maru. The Komagata Maru was a ship that sailed with a few thousand South Asians (mostly Punjab men) immigrants into a port in Vancouver hoping to live and work in Canada. The Canadian government refused to let the people on the Komagata Maru into Canada and as a result they were stranded in the port for 2 months with decreasing food and water supplies and were forced to sail back to India. When they arrived back in India, British authorities suspected that passengers were arriving to make trouble. Shooting started and officially, 26 people died although there were possibly more unrecorded deaths. If you want to get a deeper understating of the Komagata Maru, I found this video extremely helpful during my research.

We planned our memorial and had many ideas but ultimately, we ended up deciding to create a 3D model of the Komagata Maru surrounded by 26 trees, one tree for each official death that occurred.

During this exhibition we had a small grade 10 competition. Within each memorial category there was one winner from the three groups that were presenting a different memorial about the same event. To decide this winner, the visitors were asked to look at all of the displays and select their favourite ones…

Our group ended up winning with a grand total of 44 votes. I think we were so successful because our group was extremely organized, and we all were able to complete out tasks on time and to the best of our ability. We also have an interesting name that I think stuck in people’s brains when they went to vote (our group name was Tantalus). I would say we had one of the most professional looking memorials thanks to Charlie’s 3D printer which allowed parents and viewers to see our vision slightly clearer than out competitor’s. I think we would’ve have done even better if we had gotten a better spot in the room. We were by the back and there wasn’t much light so that could have potential stopped viewers from being drawn to our station. I loved this project because I got to create something physical and show it off to an audience and this has definitely been one of my favourite projects of this year. Thanks for reading and happy 2024!

New year, New Me!!!

The driving question of the project was “What strategies can I use to maintain balance in my life and support my own well-being?”

There are many strategies that I can and do use to balance my life between school assignments, extracurricular activities and leisure time. The first strategy I use is to create a to do list in things, instead of just writing the task down, I split it into several steps that make it easier to complete over a period of time. For example, if I had an essay and it was due in 6 days, I dedicate 1 day for each paragraph of the essay and on the last day I would edit it all. This has proven very helpful for completing my homework to the best of my abilities because I give myself more time to complete work to perfection or as close to it as I can. Things is another app that has proven to be one of my favourite apps time and time again. It helps me remember assignments and makes it easier to plan out my time well. This project we focused on clearing our backlog, and we learned how to be more organized in our lives and we became our new selves for the start of the school year .

The first thing we did was reflect on Grade 9. We reflected on the good, bad, shrug and ugly. In the black I have all the educational/school things that happened and in the red I have all the stuff from my personal life. I felt that a lot of things actually went well last year and reflecting on it made that feeling tangible.

During this project we researched on how to increase happiness in our life, we watched a Ted Talk called “The Happiness Advantage” I will link the video Here. This video taught me about how Happiness is internal and not the product of external gratification. You need to be able to be proud of your accomplishments to truly be happy, instead of constantly pushing yourself and forgetting how much you have already accomplished. Being truly happy and content with your life helps you focus better while working and it allows for you to create your best work.

The main part of this project was about organizing both our, real life and our digital life. The first thing I did was organize my calendar. I created time blocks for all my classes, and I added upcoming events, I also colour coordinated the events, purple for school, blue for extracurricular activities and pink for specific assignments.

I reorganized my things app and worked on getting into a habit of always updating my things when I got new assignments. In my things app I added different sections, Homelife, Maker, Humanities, Art and Spanish. In each of sections I can put my to-dos for that subject and then quickly be able to access them.

My next task was to organize my iPad files. I organized all my documents into different folders. I made folders for many of my app documents like pages, numbers and keynote. I also made folders for my old projects, personal photos and important documents.

I had noticed that a lot of my notifications had been building up, especially in my Mail app. I went through all my notifications and cleared out all my junk mail.

I realized that my problem with all the notifications is that I get a lot of junk mail, so to solve this problem I used the V.I.P option that the mail offers. Now I can check all my important mail as soon as possible and when I have extra time I can go through the rest.

I also needed to clear my mental backlog. This basically means that I need to clear my mental stress from work, life and school. Some tactics I came up with were…

1. Before I go to sleep, I’m going to write my goals for tomorrow in a note pad.

2.Before I leave to go to school, I’m going to take five minutes to meditate/relax to help my brain focus when in class.

3.Plan for every Sunday night to have a period of time in the evening for “Self-Care”. In this period. I can do whatever I want without being stressed. Some examples of self-care are having a bath, exercise, meditate or watch a movie.

4.Ask for help when I need it. Sometimes we can’t handle everything ourselves and that can be stressful, so it is important to have a back-up plan and be willing to ask for help. So, if I need more time for school, I may need to ask for help in other areas of my life.

All these systems are good for a temporary fix, but I wanted these systems to be something permanent. So, I came up with multiple ideas on how I could continue these habits for the rest of my high-school career. Every night at from 6:15-6:30, I’m going to take time to organize my things, emails and messages, and I’m going to make sure I’m up to date on all my assignments.I also have a plan of continuing my progress growth by journaling on Mondays,Wednesday and Fridays throughout the year so when it’s time to reflect on the year I have detailed journal entires of my growth. This will make projects like the Mpols and Tpols significantly easier.

You might be wondering what “Progress growth journaling” is. Well for the entirety of this project we have been keeping a journal, each day of the week is a different topic.

Mondays- Meditation (We would do class meditation and then write our thoughts about it)

Tuesdays- Act of Kindness (We would have a task every Tuesday to do something kind in our neighbourhood, after we completed it we would reflect on how it made us feel)

Wednesdays- Exercise (We would do a class workout/walk and we would reflect on how it changed our emotions and affected our day)

Thursday- Journaling (We were given a random topic every Thursday and we would have to write about it)

Friday- Acts of gratitude (We would reflect on our days; I would write about what made me thankful and what made me happy that day)

After this entire project I have decided that there are certain systems that I want to keep using and some that I do not. I want to keep using the things app because that worked extremely well for me, it helped me remember my assignments and I felt way more organized. Another tactic that I want to keep is updating my calendar. This helped me stay on top of events especially when I had a busy week. The one tactic that I want to get rid of is journaling every weekday, I still want to keep a journal that I write in once or twice a week but not every single day.

This project has helped me with my organization and agency. I have been able to take better care into my learning and have been better at not procrastinating my work. I do struggle with remembering my work and I want to work on my time management, this project has given me a start on this journey and hopeful if I can keep these habits up I will be able to prosper.

The truth about the biggest war in modern history!! 🇨🇦

World War II (WWII) was an extremely impactful event for countries all over the world, including Canada. This project we learned about the main events that occurred during WW2 and how Canada contributed to the war efforts of the allies. The final goal of this project was to write an essay on the importance of learning about Canada’s war efforts in WWII.

How did WW2 start? One of the main contributors to WW2 was the Great Depression. When the stock market crashed, many countries went into a state of economic depression, it caused a lot of political instability. The political chaos allowed for dictators like Hitler gain control. Some people in Germany felt that they needed a leader that would take action and “Make Germany great again” after their defeating loss in WWI. Once Aldof Hitler gained control of Germany, he decided to send his army to invaded Poland in 1939 which drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany.

As I said earlier the main goal of this project was to write an essay so I will show you my process. The first step of writing my essay was writing a thesis. I had to revise this thesis a couple of times till it was up to standard for my essay. The thesis I ended up writing was “Canada’s role in WW2 is commonly overlooked compared to other larger countries, so we need to learn about how WW2 truly affected our society today.“ This was going to be the main topic of my essay. The next thing I did was write a draft of my essay, there were a lot of editing mistakes and topics that needed to be revised but I am going to fix all those

I got some of my classmates and parents to revise my essay and give me edits to help elevate my writing. Firstly my classmate Kira edited my essay,(you can visit here blog here). She went over lots of small mistakes that I didn’t notice the first time.

Next I got my mom to edit over my essay. She fixed a lot more of the grammar and editing issues than Kira did, but she also gave me some tips on what more details I should add to better my essay.

You can check out the fully edited version here.

To write this essay I had to come up with 3 main points that would be the evidence to my thesis. These would be the topics of my 3 body paragraphs.

The first paragraph was about How and what Canada contributed to the Allies war efforts. I talked about the supplies and pilots that Canada gave to the Allies during the war.

The second body paragraph I talked about Canadas role in the D-day invasion and other extremely significant battles.

The last body paragraph I wrote was about the consequences during and after the war for Canada.

After I finished all these edits I had my finished product, which I ended up being extremely proud of. Writing is not my favourite topic but I truly enjoyed researching and learning about WWII. My favourite part of this project was learning about all the events of WW2 and doing Kahoots on them. I got to learn a lot about WWII that I had didn’t understand before. If I had to improve my final project I would have added more details about the United Nations and N.A.T.O. I also would have gone over and edit it more.

Thanks for reading my post, Have a great day!!!

Canada 🇨🇦 through my eyes

The goal of this project was to understand how Canadians are viewed by the countries around us and how to beat the general stereotypes of Canadian life.

Important Starting Information

We started or by learning about Canada and how the laws here are created following the Charter of Rights.

The Charter rights protects different rights and freedoms. Some of the rights and freedoms are..

Fundamental Freedoms

Main Points

– Everyone in Canada is free to practise and religion or none

– We are allowed to express are religion in private and public

– We are allowed to speak our minds, and listen to opposing view (this doesn’t include hate crime and threats of violence)

– We’re allowed to protest against a government action or institution

As you can see the charter rights are basically the laws of Canada in the simplest forms. The basic human rights that the Supreme Court of Canada believes should be enforced.

The official English version of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, is shown.

Canadian Identitiy through Economy

Each person in my class had to chose a topic that related to our Canadian Identity, we then had to become an expert on our topic. The topic that I chose was economy. I wrote about how the economy of Canada is effected by our geography and how our Canadian identity is effected by our economy. After we were done becoming experts on our topic we had group discussions. The first discussion we had was with people who has similar topics to ours. The topics in our group were Economy (mine), Hockey, Air Canada and Tourism. In this group we easily found similarities and had an easy conversation. Then we had a conversation in groups with topics completely different to ours. In my different goroup the topics were, Economy (mine), Chinese immigrants, Canadian Actors and Animals. This conversation was harder to talk about similarities, but it seemed to flow smoother because everybody had a lot of different points to bring up. In the elevator pitch that I presented I briefly described my topic. Here is my elevator pitch…

How does the Canadian economy support Canadian identity?

Considering how small our population is Canada has one of the strongest economies in the world, in 9th place as of 2023, just behind France and the UK. The reason Canada has a strong economy is that it has many natural resources including minerals from the Canadian Shield, timber from British Columbia, fish from the Atlantic region, wheat and grains from the prairies and oil and gas from Alberta. The three largest/most profitable industries in Canada are commercial banking, primary care/doctors and apartment rental . Commerical Banking is controlled mainly by interest rates, Health care is effected by population growth from immigrants and the increase of rental demand is supporting growth in the rental market. Some benefits of having a large economy are that many Canadians have good job opportunities, generating higher tax revenues allowing the government to spend more money on publicly funded services like free health care and widespread education. An additional benefit of a strong economy is a higher average income allowing more Canadians to keep up with inflation. Our economy supports the idea that Canada is a prosperous country, that is safe and enjoyable to live in.

Human Library

For the final part of this project we hosted a Human Library at our school. You might be wondering “What is a Human Library?”. A human library is a safe space where people who have lived different experices to ours have the chance to share their story. Instead of borrowing a book, you would borrow a conversation from someone. A human library is a place where you can ask people questions that you would not get to normally ask them in public.

Our human Library

In our human library each person from our class invited 1-3 people. In total 18 people/books were able to show up. We had many guests about 5 people talked to each book. I ended up talking to 3 books. All the books had exccedingly different stories. One person I talked to was a surgeon who immigrated from England to B.C., the second person I talked to was an engineer who constructed contraptions for disabled people in his free time (if you want to learn more about what he does you can visit this website https://tetrasociety.org/) and finally I talked to a lawyer who immigrated from Equador to Canada. I personally think our human library was very successful, I got to talk to so many people with interesting stories about their lives.

Overall I actually enjoyed this project a lot. My favorite part of this project was the Human Library. It went a lot better than how I thought it would and I greatly enjoyed hearing all the cool stories. My least favorite part of this project was when we had the group conversations because I struggled to come up with good questions to ask. But I learned a lot and had fun during this project. Thanks for reading my post and have a great day!

Tpol 2023

What am I most proud of this year?

There are 2 projects that I am so proud of this year. My Alberta book and my Avatar video. The reason I’m proud of these projects is because even when I had difficulties I was able to create a product that I was proud of.

Alberta Book

This project I finished very efficiently and didn’t procrastinate so I was able to get a lot of time for editing. This is a habit that I strive to have because I procrastinate a lot. This project made me see how much easier and less stressful it is to complete your work over a long period of time instead of doing all the work right before this due.

Avatar video

This video needed a lot of new skills that I had never used. I had to find someone to interview and I had to make a detailed video which I had never done before. Even though I had many struggles I was able to make a video that I was super proud of and got to show at the exhibition.

What I am least proud of this year?

I would say I’m least proud of my frankenstuffie project because I didn’t execute my story or video very well in my opinion. I struggled a lot because I had to write a story and I struggle with writing. So I had to spend a lot of time trying to make a detailed story and then on top of that make a video. Even though I struggled with the story I think that my trailer actually turned out good.

I also wish that I had done something more exciting for the spring exhibition, I made a infographic even though I had the opportunity to make anything I wanted to. I wish I had made a model or done some form of art.

What is the most interesting thing I learned this year?

I learned how to interview people for information to make documentaries. I find this skill very useful for the future and interesting.

What skills do you feel you most improved on?

I feel that my communication skills have significantly improved since last year and over the last term. I am now able to communicate with groups to plan and achieve projects. I also feel as if I have gotten better at giving my ideas to groups and always find a way to help,

What skills do I want to develop?

I want to learn how to ask for help when I need it. I struggle to communicate with my teachers when I don’t understand something or need help with assignments. I think that this skill is an extremely important skill that I will need for the rest of my life because you will never always understand something on the first try. So knowing when and how to ask for help is a skill that I strive to get. To do this I will start by emailing my teachers when I need help and progress from that till I’m confident enough to ask question by raising my hand in class.

I also want to become better at writing. Over the last couple projects I have really struggled with expressing my ideas in words. Even though I have made significant strides in my ability to write I still really struggle with it and I hope that over the next few years of PLP I am able to learn how to write long and detailed paragraphs with ease. I need to expand my vocabulary and write more advanced paragraphs/posts. To achieve this goal I am going to read for 30 minutes a day and keep a journal where I write about anything. This will help me expand my vocabulary, my spelling and my overall writing skills.

What did I most enjoy about this year?

My favourite part of this year was either sewing the frankenstuffies or winter exhibition.

My frankenstuffie

The winter exhibition

The reason I enjoyed the winter exhibition is because we got a lot of control over what we did. We got to design most of the rooms in the exhibition and we got lots of control. I also liked the theme Avatar because throughout all the rooms if felt very consistent.

Why am I ready for grade 10?

I feel that 8 am ready for grade 10 because my abilities to learn have improved so much in this last year. I have made significant strides in my communication skills with my peers and I have been able to competently understand how to critique my projects.