Tagged: mPOLS

Time for tPOLs!

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! This year is coming to an end which means…drum roll please….time for tPOLs! tPOLs (Transitional Presentation of Learning) is a student led conference where the student presents to their parents and teachers what they learned, what they improved on and what they’d like to continue to improve on. Different from mPOLs, in your tPOLs, you discuss how you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level. You can visit my tPOLs from last year here and my mPOLs from earlier this year here. So let’s get started shall we?

Maker

At my mPOLs, one of the goals that I wanted to focus the most on in maker was continuing to improve on my movie making and editing skills. So, I decided to choose my Witness to History project to talk about. This project wasn’t just a great project to do but I found that it served as a great example of the fact that I’m continuing to improve my movie making skills because I think that this was the best video I’ve made this year. I had a little animation going on, some great angles and shots, I had some old clips of life before COVID-19, my music sounded pretty good compared to the little experience I have with GarageBand and everything that I had to say was really well put together and not too long.

Since I’ll have so much time on my hands this summer, I want to get even better at movie making; I still have lots and lots of clips from my trip to Costa Rica during winter break earlier this year that I have yet to edit and put together. Maybe even making my own music to go in those videos so I can become more experienced with GarageBand to prepare for next year. 

Humanities

At my mPOLs, I discussed how I’d like to continue on improving my writing skills, since that was something I struggled with since the beginning of grade 8. And although I have come a pretty long way and improved a whole lot, there is still plenty of work to do in terms of my writing. But, if you look at my first blog post compared to my most recent, you can see that I had gotten way better at reflecting on what I had done in my projects and had also improved on my introductions and my conclusions. One of the projects that I decided to talk about was The Great War. I was pretty proud of the writing I had done in the book pages I did because it was just the perfect length, it was really well put together and well detailed. I was also happy that I had started to use better vocabulary in some parts of the book that increased the quality of the writing in the book. Since I struggle a lot with using better vocabulary because about half of what I say or write consists of words like: like, a lot, lots, definetly, etc. This summer, since I’ll have lots of time on my hands, I will be doing lots of reading and practicing essays to continue improving my writing. 

Scimatics

At my tPOLs last year, I had the goal of eventually starting to write notes from lessons down in some sort of notebook. Because for me, it helps me process information way easier. Which I actually have started to do for the past month or two ever since we’ve been doing online school. I have been making lots of notes from the khan academy lessons and quizzes that we’ve done for our time is money and meiosis models project.

In my mPOLs earlier this year I talked about my problem with perfectionism and the fact that I would always go back to my work and tweak and tweak it. Honestly, if there weren’t any deadlines, I would be tweaking my work non stop till the end of time. I got a whole lot better at that this year especially in the last month or so with all my work for that matter. I figured out that the best way to avoid tweaking my work for hours on end was distracting myself. Wether it was going for a run or a walk outside, cleaning my room, or spending time with my family. Which also got me off of my devices which was great.

PGP

I believe that this year was a great turning year for me. I had last year, where I focused a lot on adjusting to a fully English school as compared to a fully french one. But now, in grade 9, I’ve focused on my studying habits and finding out what works best for me not to mention just always trying to better myself and how effectively I work. But, as there is always room left for improvement, I would like to focus on certain habits from the 7 habits which is what we’ve been focusing on the last couple months in our PGP course. Although I do need to use and constantly remind myself of all of the habits in the 7 habits, I’d like to focus on habits 2, 6 and 7; Beginning with the end in mind, synergizing and sharpening the saw. 

In terms of beginning with the end in mind, as I am moving into grade 10 which I still cannot believe to this day, this is the first year of high school that universities look at. Therefore, I’d like to start getting into things and volunteering for things that I’m interested in. Wether it’s the BC SPCA to see if I’d like to do something like that or even just help out at a local veterinary clinic. I am still not too sure what I’d like to be interested in, but for next year, I’d like to focus on trying new things and figuring out what I’m into. 

For habit 6, synergizing, I’ve had some projects where I have worked very well with my group members and some others not so much. To improve on this habit, I would start to find a way that I could do better on working with all of my classmates in projects. 

For habit 7, I realized that when you really think about it, habit 7 is really what life is all about because, you should always try to better yourself and go up instead of down. So, to improve on this habit, I will take the time this summer, as I will have lots of time, to set and achieve goals and eventually become my very best self. 

To conclude, I have found this year to be a pretty successful one, I have learned lots and worked hard and am looking forward to next year where I’ll be able to start a new year with all of the wisdom I have now so that way, I can strive for an even more successful year in grade 10. Now I’d like to finish off my tPOL with a simple question. I have talked about some work habits that I thought I should work on such as my perfectionism and synergizing with classmates, what are some work habits that you’ve observed that you think I should work on or try to improve?