Hi y’all and welcome back to my blog! Today I will be talking about our latest project that was presented at this year’s winter exhibition, called the story strikes back. In this years presentation, we were assigned to write short stories about a non-main-character and create something that has to do with our part of the story. In this post, I will be talking about the different milestones we went through in the story and each step in the launch journal. 

1. Opinion Post

Our first assignment for this project was to write our personal opinions on the Star Wars saga, me, being a huge Star Wars fan, had a lot to say. 

Expressing and supporting opinions: express an opinion and support it with credible evidence. 

Evidence: Assess the justification for competing historical accounts after investigating points of contention, reliability of sources, and adequacy of evidence.

Even though this wasn’t my best work, I was still pretty proud with my text. Although, I had a few grammar mistakes and as my feedback wasn’t really that I did something wrong but that I could go back and add more stuff as support later in the project. 

2. Literary Analysis Test

This milestone was completed after we read a whole lot of short stories and learned about the different terms such as theme, symbol, setting and different points of views.

Literary Identification and Analysis: Recognize how literary elements, techniques, and devices enhance and shape meaning.

The Writing Process: Transform ideas and information, using appropriate features, forms, and genres, through the writing process to plan, create, assess, and refine original, engaging, and meaningful literary and informational texts for a variety of purposes, audiences, and messages while using an increasing repertoire of conventions (Canadian spelling, grammar, and punctuation) and appropriate citations for clarity, effectiveness, and Impact. 

While I was studying for this test, my best technique to keep all of the facts and such in my mind, was to write it down on paper. I use technology for somethings, but when it comes to studying for a test, doing “the old fashioned way” works much better for me. I felt as though I worked and studied very hard on this test and deserved the note that I got. I wouldn’t of changed anything that I did on that test. 

3. Hero’s Journey Outline

In our groups, after learning about the different parts of a story, we, as in Malaika, Emily, Gabe, Anders, Anthony and Jude all decided what we would include in our stories and who was writing each one. 

#1

#2

Creating and Extending Shared Understanding: Exchange ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking.

Literary Identification and Analysis: Recognize how literary elements, techniques, and devices enhance and shape meaning

Our journey’s outline did not turn out that well and we did not get the best grade on it. And when I saw it, I went back and used. The feedback that we received and fixed it. Our teacher later told us that we didn’t have to do that but, at least we could still use it as a good resource. 

4. Movie Review Post

If you’d like to see this post, click here. This was basically an assignment where we reviewed any star wars movie.

Expressing and Supporting Opinions: Express an opinion and support it with credible evidence.

Evidence: Assess the justification for competing historical accounts after investigating points of contention, reliability of sources, and adequacy of evidence.

 I think that I had a very good and strong point with good evidence to support it. The document was also well formatted and looked pretty eye appealing. To make it better, I would add more visuals to also enhance the quality of the review like I see on most reviews written by professional writers.   

5. Story

Feedback:

Draft 1:

Draft 2:

Draft 3:

Creating and Extending Shared Understanding: Exchange ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking.

Literary Identification and Analysis: Recognize how literary elements, techniques, and devices enhance and shape meaning.

The Writing Process: Transform ideas and information, using appropriate features, forms, and genres, through the writing process to plan, create, assess, and refine original, engaging, and meaningful literary and informational texts for a variety of purposes, audiences, and messages while using an increasing repertoire of conventions (Canadian spelling, grammar, and punctuation) and appropriate citations for clarity, effectiveness, and impact.  

For each draft, except for the first one, I only really ever had a few things to change to make it better. But, overall, I was pretty proud about my story since writing has never really been my strong suit and the story turned out much better than I thought it would.  

6. Design

This milestone was the design for our planet on the day of the exhibition.

Creating and Extending Shared Understanding: Exchange ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking.

Evidence: Assess the justification for competing historical accounts after investigating points of contention, reliability of sources, and adequacy of evidence. 

This was our first plan, it was very messy and not at all organized, which made us the least organized out of all the other groups. 

Then, we completely changed our plan and changed it to this, which made us the most organized for a while. The whole group (grade 9’s, 8’s and 12’s) came together to exchange all of our ideas and finalize them. 

7. Launch journal & presentation

Now for the thing that we were supposed to create to support our part of the story, I made a hologram which actually one of four in the entire exhibition which was kind of a bummer but I still was really proud as to how it all turned out.  I made everything that I used from scratch: I made the pyramid and cut the plastic, I drew and animated the guy talking and I recorded the audio in the message. Plus, I even made a small droid to enhance my presentation. 

Here are some pictures of the exhibition:   

 

 

To conclude, I really enjoyed going out of my comfort zone and being challenged during this project, it was stressful most times, but once it’s all over, you feel great and super proud of yourself, which is how I felt at the end.