Category: PLP 9

Learning Advance, Because we Never Retreat.

Now this post is going to be a bit different than my other posts. Yes, this is a reflection post, but this time it is not reflecting on a project that we did at school. The PLP 8s and 9s went away on a learning advance!

A Brief Explanation 

So you may be wondering why I am referring to this trip as an advance, and that is because PLP never retreats! Hahaha lmao yeah its basically just a trip away with my class. We went to Loon Lake Lodge in maple ridge from the 14th-17th of February. We took all of the PLP 8s and 9s so I suppose that was maybe about 50+ kids. I was not super excited to go away on this trip just because I was worried that it was going to rain and be miserable but it didn’t end up raining much and was actually quite fun. So without further adieu, lets get into the day to day.

Day 1

Day 1 schedule

Above is the day schedule for our first day at Loon lake. We arrived at school at the normal time in the morning to start our Book (I’ll talk about that later) and get all of our stuff on the luggage bus and ready to go. Then we departed for the long drive over to maple ridge at lunch and the adventure began. We did a nice little trail walk and scavenger hunt activity to help us get to know the area. Then we were assigned our rooms and I was happily surprised to see that I had my bestie Dana as my room buddy. Then the evening moved on and we went to sleep.

Day 2

Day 2 started bright and early with most of us feeling very tired. The food was good and we were ready to start our morning work block. We worked on our “Believe in Good” project, the personal bank account, and our book. Yes I will talk about this infamous book later in this post.Lunch was followed by an outdoor shelter building activity and some time to work on out DI stuff. We then had dinner and evening fun. After a full day of activities we were quite ready to go to bed.

Day 3

Yet again I woke up feeling not very well rested. It was pretty much the same as day 2 but the outdoor activities were battle archery and forest laser tag. I was incredibly cowardly during battle archery because I did not like the skill-intense confrontational aspect of it. I think that  being too cautious is a common theme throughout my life already so it was funny to see it appear here as-well. However I was a god at forest laser tag and really enjoyed that. Laser tag is something that I have always loved and the way that they set up the laser tag with different guns and stuff just made it that much cooler. I ended day 3 early after dinner and just decompressed in my room for the rest of the evening.

Day 4

Day 4 was the last day up at loon lake and I woke up quite well rested because off the early time off I took on the night of day 3. We did our last outdoor activity as capture the flag and then after lunch we set sail for Seycove.

The Book

Now time to explain this “book” that I have been mentioning throughout this post. This book had sections where we would fill out certain prompts each day that we were there. We would work on this book a lot during advisory group time and most of us ended up having to finish the book at home later. I would highly suggest looking through this book because it is a great reflection of my time at look lake.

Conclusion

Overall this was a fun trip and I think I learned more about how I approach taking risks. Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed my book!

As Always, Brooke.

mPOL 2022 Here we go

Hello and welcome to my first mPOL (mid-year presentation of learning). Now normally, this would not be my first mPOL, but because we did not do them in grade 8, this will be my first one. In this mPOL, I will be answering 2 driving questions. “How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?”, and “How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?”

I shall start off with the first question. 

How have I demonstrated growth as a learner so far this year?

I feel the best way to show the answer to this would be to start with the projects that I think demonstrated my best work for each class (except maker because that is next semester).

Humanities

“Working with Words” 

You can check out my blog post for this project here.

I chose this project because it has been my favourite humanities project that we have done so far. Because of this, I worked hard in the project, and I am really proud of the outcome. I think I enjoyed this project the most because I love poetry and liked how we could really make this project to our own specifications and tailored to us as an individual.

I learned a lot about poetry in this project, as well as presentation skills and public speaking. This project taught me the importance of creativity, looking inward and trying to decipher who you are, and how to bounce ideas off of peers. I think during this project is when I grew most and had the most fun in school since the beginning of the year.

Scimatics

“Chemistry stories“

You can check out my blog post for this project here.

I chose this project because I think it shows my perseverance. I was struggling internally a lot during the time of this project so I am proud that I was still able to produce good quality work. I also enjoyed learning more about atoms and the processes that go into making the matter that is all around us.

How can I sharpen my Learning Plan to ensure I will reach my learning targets by the end of this school year?

Though I think that my learning plan is has good goals for me to work towards in the rest of the year, I am actually quite content with not meeting the proficiency requirements that I have set on my learning plan. Due to the recent influx of stress, I have come to the conclusion that my mental health was being damaged greatly by trying really hard for extending marks and always being 100% attentive. So yes, I would still like to get extending marks whenever I can but I am not going to be disappointed if my grades do not match what I have set on my learning plan.

Some things that I feel I have done well at that are in my learning plan would be;

  1. I have been using things regularly for both school and non school related tasks and it has helped me greatly.
  2. I have set up routines that help me focus on my homework and help me not to get discouraged.
  3. I have been using more positive affirmations to help me balance mental health with academics.
  4. I have been asking my peers/parents more often when I need clarification on concepts that I do not understand.

Some areas that I want to have more growth in by the end of the year would be;

  1. Asking my teachers for help when I need it.
  2. Give myself more time to write better reflections and responses (humanities).
  3. Take more notes when I think I may forget the information that if being shared. Especially when I am having a hard time being “present” in class.
  4. Starting homework asap so that I don’t put it off until the point where I am then rushing to get it done.

I hope you enjoyed my mPOL and I will see you again at the tPOL’s! (Transitional presentation of learning)

As always, Brooke.

Loooook It’s Sodium Hydroxide!

Hola mi amigos 👋🏼. Welcome to another scimatics post on this lovely blog of mine.  I have quite a few blog posts I have to write at the moment so im not going to drone on and on with this intro so lets just hop right on into the project.

Project Overview

This project was called “Chemistry stories” and in this project we were to create an animated video about chemical bonding. We would be using keynote to create the animation and then voiceovers would be added in a separate app like iMovie (but i used a great app called InShot). Then the final video would be presented to the class.

Project Start Mind Map

As per usual we started the scimatics project off with a project start mind map. I put in any questions I had for the project, what I already knew about atoms and matter, and all of the questions from the QFTs.

At the end of this project we also added to the mind map a section about what we learned from this project and I also answered as many questions as possible that I came up with at the beginning of the project. 

The Project

We did a fun little experiment called “Investigation 2A” in this project where we got to see some chemical reactions up close and personal. But before we did the experiment, we practised creating an animation by showing the steps that we would be doing. We used keynote to create the short animation and I used the instant alpha feature to take stock images and turn them into moving pieces for the animation.

Lab animation

 

We also did quite the bulk of workbook pages to further learn about this new thing called ionic and covalent bonds and how they are formed. We also learned about writing chemical formulas and learning how to say the names of different covalent compounds.

And as per proper video composition, we created storyboards to help us plan out what we would be putting into the animation;

Driving Question

How do the electron arrangements of atoms determine the chemical and physical properties of elements and compounds?

I have to say that the best answer to this question would be the animation video itself as it talks about the attraction of the atoms based on their electron arrangements. So without further ado, here is the final product;

Curricular Competencies

Processing and Analyzing: Construct, analyze and interpret models and/or diagrams

My story boards had accurate Bohr diagrams and clearly showed the processes of both ionic and covalent bonding. I think I demonstrated a sophisticated level of understanding because I added a lot of different components and prior knowledge along with questions that we had for the project. I was able to articulate my ideas cleanly into my mind map layout.

Questioning and Predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest

My Project Start Mind Map shows how I can display my prior knowledge and prepare for new evidence. The Investigation 2A Lab Report showed that I can form a reasonable hypothesis using what I already know. I demonstrated an accomplished level of understanding with this milestone. My storyboard was well thought out and accurately showed snapshots of what would take place in the animation.

Communicating: Formulate physical or mental theoretical models to describe a phenomenon

My voiceovers are mostly clear and synced with my animation. I find that my video has a solid amount of humour in the voiceovers mixed with scientific language and motion in the animation. I feel I demonstrated an accomplished level of understanding with my animated video because I meet the expectations in the evaluation rubric. Plus I think that my video is quite entertaining.

Conclusion

So this project definitely expanded my knowledge of atoms and the different things that they can do. In conclusion this project was quite cool and I think that I did a pretty good job overall. Also shout out to Walter the emotional support kangaroo-

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

Insert Name Here – Worldview in Poetry

Salutations! I am back with a very exciting humanities blog post. This project was called “Working With Words” and its all about poetry. Now you may have remembered that i actually did a blog post on poetry in grade 8 for the student blogging challenge -> A Dive Into Literature – Poetry, and if you read that post you would already know that I am a big poetry fan. So lets find out what this project was all about!

The Driving Question

The driving question for this project was “How might I construct text that shows who I am right now?”, and the answer is… through using different types of poetry! This project taught us how to find creativity and joy in poetry, comprehend poetry to make meaning, and how to use creativity, joy, and meaning to create effective texts. I chose to try and improve myself in the competency of “Positive personal and cultural identity” because I felt that it was the perfect competency for a poetry book about my worldview. Wait did I just say worldview? Yup! This project also brought back the idea of world view and its 7 different aspects (time, geography, beliefs, economy, knowledge, society, and values). And overall I think that I did a great job at demonstrating and growing in the area of personal and cultural awareness throughout this short project, so keep an eye out while reading my eBook and see if you think I did :).

The Project

Of course a lot of people do not know much of the technical side of poetry so we started off with building our knowledge on poetry terminology. Over the course of the project we would be learning 18 new vocabulary words and creating 9 different types of poems. With each new term  came a new activity and a lot of practise analyzing and presenting poems. Here are some of the poetry terms that we learned;

And as we were starting to make all of these poems, we had to create a place to put them all… 

A super duper amazing eBook! The eBook would display all of our poems and include texts and audio messages to complement each one. We also had a bio page where we have an about me video and link to this wonderful blog that you are currently on. Ok enough of this, I think the best way to learn about what we did in this project would be to just look at my book! Here it is;

Conclusion 

The final showcase of this project will be a live-streamed “coffee house” performance that we are putting on tomorrow night at school. I am not entirely sure what it consists of yet but I’m sure it will be quite entertaining! Overall i think that this was my favourite humanities project that we have done and I am hopeful that this will motivate me to write poetry more often. I think that it was at times a little challenging to think about how to put my worldview into words but i think that I got the hang of it by the end. I am very proud of the work that I did in this project and hopefully we can use poetry in another project soon!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

Guilty as Charged!

Bonjour and welcome back to another Humanities blog post.

This project was called “Revolutions on Trial”, and in this project, as you may have guessed, we took famous revolutions and put them into a mock trial.

Crane Brinton – The Anatomy of a Revolution

Most of us started this project off not knowing much about revolutions, so one of the first pieces of building knowledge that we did, was learn why revolutions happen and what the different stages of a revolution look like. We studied Crane Brinton’s theory of revolutions, consisting of 4 main stages. The stages were incubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery, followed by a question of either peace or war? We were asked to create a diagram to showcase Crane Brinton’s theory, here is mine;

Animal Farm

A new thing that we did in this project, was study and read a book that was related to the topic. This book was called Animal Farm was written by George Orwell. This story of animals rebelling on a farm was created as an analogy for the events and characters in the Russian Revolution (Mar 8, 1917 – Jun 16, 1923). Every week we had new chapters to read and after every one, we had to write a little summary of the chapter with any questions we had. When we came into class, we would have to discuss what we read and our thoughts and feelings towards the chapters. We analyzed the events in the book to coincide with what we had learned about the anatomy of revolution. This was a good chance to practice identifying the stages of a revolution because we would need to use these same skills later on in the project.

The French Revolution

We were split into two different class rooms and assigned to a group with a revolution that we would be studying for the rest of the project. My group was the French Revolution, and we would be the ones arguing in defence of the revolution in the mock trial. After countless articles read, podcasts listened to, and YouTube videos watched, I had gained quite the chunk of knowledge on the French Revolution. We created graphic organizers to display some of what we had learned and if we identified any patterns of continuity and change. Here is my graphic organizer;

The Mock Trial

Once all the building knowledge on our revolution was done, we moved on to preparing for the trial. This included building an affidavit with the prosecution group from the other class, preparing a witness, and writing a script. We chose our witness to be Maximilien Robespierre, a prominent leader of the Jacobin club and headlined the famous “Reign of Terror” era in the time of the French Revolution. We worked side by side with the prosecution to concoct a script that we would be using for the trial. We had to come up with opening statements, closing statements, direct examination questions, and cross examination questions, all to hopefully prove that the revolution was, in fact, NOT guilty.

Now lets talk a bit about that. What do we mean by the revolution being guilty? Well, the PLP 9 court established a list of 6 criteria/goals that an effective revolution would have demonstrated. The revolutions would be judged on how many, if any, of those goals they achieved and to what extent they actually accomplished them. The criteria was as follows;

A revolution to be effective must include the reformation political systems aligning with the voice of the people, an increase of rights and freedoms for the people, a removal of a dictator with sweeping power, the achievement of financial stability, an improvement in standard of living, and the removal of internal conflict.

And as the defence, my team was arguing that the revolution was effective, and the prosecution was arguing the opposite. The mock trials would be taking place at the winter exhibition where we would have our live audience (a jury if you will) decide the fate of the revolution, guilty or not? Now unfortunately I was unable to be at the winter exhibition but luckily we were recording. Here is the video of the French Revolution, on trial.

Conclusion

Unfortunately we lost the trial to the prosecutors. But nevertheless I am very proud of how far my team came from the beginning and I am so sorry that I couldn’t be there in the end to help us win. Kudos to the prosecution though because they definitely were a very strong team and to be fair, we never stood a chance against them. Overall I really enjoyed learning about revolutions and I think that a mock trial was a super cool way to have us showcase what we had learned.

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

A ✨Snazzy✨ Correlation

Have you ever heard someone talking about correlation vs causation? Perhaps in the latest season of Manifest on Netflix? Well that was the topic of this project, correlation vs causation.

Driving Question

How are correlation and causation different?

Causation is when A causes B or vice versa. It could also be when factor C causes both A and B. Correlation is when there is a relationship between A and B but there doesn’t necessarily have to be causation.

Project Overview

In this project we were to create a survey and video or formal presentation that compares a correlation with no causation and a correlation that does have a logical explanation of causation between the variables. We used numbers to create graphs to show the data that we collected from our surveys. This was also a partner project where we would be collaborating on creating a single project with our partner.

Project Start Mind Map

As per usual we started the scimatics project off with a project start mind map. I put in any questions I had for the project, what I already knew about correlation vs causation, and any ideas that I had for survey questions.

At the end of this project we also added to the mind map a section about what we learned from this project.

The Project

I think that the best way to show you the bulk of our project is by the keynote presentation that we presented to the class.  The presentation included information about our survey audience, our graph results, and our definition to the driving question. Here is the link:

A survey pour toi 

Curricular Competencies 

Planning and conducting: Select and use appropriate equipment, including digital technologies, to systematically and accurately collect and record data;

We found at least 3 correlations using our well crafted survey results. The survey results and correlations were displayed and explained through a keynote presentation to the class. We analyzed the graphs to confirm if there was cause for correlation because the line that automatically shows up was often misleading.

Communicating and Representing: Use mathematical vocabulary and language to contribute to mathematical discussions;

We created our presentation with helpful visual aids and well crafted written explanations. We had two main examples where we showed a correlation that we falsely thought would have causation and one that actually had correlation and causation.

Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches;

We used good ethics when creating the survey questions and conducting the survey. In class I was very focused and productive. I am very pleasantly surprised with my ability to stay on task while working on this project.

Conclusion 

So our correlations were not incredibly strong, but we were able to identify correlations and some causations in our graphs. We also found this project fun and it expanded our brain cells. I really enjoyed working with my good pal Dana and I hope to work with her again soon.

As always, Brooke.

Work, Work, Work!

Wednesday Nov 3, 2021. I did not go to school on Wednesday. Why? To go to work!

Wednesday was nation wide “Take Our Kids To Work Day”. I went to work with my mom at Pacific Blue Cross BC. I had been to my mom’s work many times before but this time I would be shadowing her for the whole day.

Not going to school didn’t mean that I could just sit around and do nothing at my moms work all day, no, I was filming like crazy. We were instructed to create a video showcasing our day at work with our expectations/review and an interview.

Without further ado, here is the video;

I would say that the best part of my day was a tie between having a nice lunch out at the hotel for the Burnaby Board of Trade awards luncheon or having some 1 on 1 time with some of my mom’s colleges and get to know them and what they do at the company.

Both this blog post and the video are quite short today but hopefully this got the point across. It is definitely not my most interesting post either but hopefully you found the video a least a little entertaining.

Thank you for watching/reading!

As always, Brooke.

Congratulations You Just Killed a Turtle

Hello to whomever is reading this 👋🏼. Tis I, Brooke. And I’m back with my second blog post for this new school year. 

People and the environment. Let’s talk about it. The driving question for this project was “How do people and the environment affect each other?” And the short answer is rather simple. Both people and the environment hold a lot of power over one another.

The product of this project is a physical letter sent to someone who can create change on a specific environmental issue. I wrote my letter about plastic bag pollution to the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the Honourable George Heyman. But in order to have a letter that is worthy of being sent to such an important person, we had to do a lot of writing practice.

The letter

The topic of our letter is an environmental issue of our choice in British Columbia. I chose to research and write about plastic pollution in BC, specifically plastic bags. I researched a lot about what BC is already doing about reducing single use plastic and I came across CleanBC’s Plastics Action Plan. I think that reducing single use plastic waste is super important and that is why I chose to bring this issue up with Minister George Heyman.

  • First letter draft

I only put two drafts into the slideshow because most of my drafts were just adding small details or re-wording a sentence or two. Overall I think that I could’ve done a more sophisticated job at executing the final letter but I am still proud of what I put into the mailbox.

CommonLit

A very important part of this project was CommonLit.org. We read 5 texts from CommonLit that all had something to do with the environment. We also did 2 writing lesson assignments that went along with 2 of those texts. The lessons taught us about writing explanations and using evidence with context. There were also 2 vocabulary quizzes that took place on CommonLit to help us use better vocabulary choices when writing about climate change. Overall even though I found the CommonLit assignments annoying at times, I can definitely say that they have helped me improve the way I write.

About two weeks into this project we read a CommonLit poem called “Song For The Turtles”. We were then asked to go outside and write our own poem about our environment. Lots of people wrote their poems about the destruction of the environment but I chose to write mine about what I observed while sitting among the sunflowers in the school garden. Here is my poem;

Sitting Among The Sunflowers 

Sitting among the sunflowers
Their tall stalks jutting up from the earth beneath
Reaching towards the sun with their flowers of gold

Bees swiftly fly to and fro
Working hard for their hive
Ants climbing up the stalks
On a mission they have yet to complete

A soft breeze arrives and the garden comes alive
The leaves shiver and sway
But the strength of the stalks never stray
Sitting among the sunflowers

Ok so admit I’m no Edgar Allan Poe, but I think that writing the poems was a great  exercise in observing our environment.

CommonLit Connections

The CommonLit connections was one of the final activities in this project. We learned about identifying the theme of a text, and then had to identify the theme of our letter and the theme of one of the CommonLit texts that we read. We then wrote a multi-paragraph response connecting our letter with one of the texts, I chose to use a story called “He-y Come on Ou-t”. The common theme that I came up with for the two texts was “Simple actions can have devastating consequences on the environment.”

My CommonLit connection

What have I learned?

I can say with confidence that my writing improved greatly throughout this project. I have come to be more aware of the devastating damage that climate change is doing to our planet. I hope that my letter can help create change in BC with the help of our government.

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

IT’S THE EXPONENT APOCALYPSE

HellooOOooOooOOOOoooOOO and welcome back to another year of PLP blog posts. As you may have guessed, we just finished our first project in Scimatics 9. I found this project to be similar to the game about tectonic plates that we did in grade 8. The end result of this project was to be fun game that used exponent laws. And without further ado, I shall take you through the ins and outs of the creation of my partner and I’s game, the EXPONENT APOCALYPSE.

Starting off

As per any usual scimatics project, this project started with a project start mind map. The project start mind maps are a way to gather all of your knowledge and questions before starting the new project. I tried to write down all of the ways that math is included in games and what I already knew about exponents.

The project

We launched this project with a practise in creating game rules. As a group we were asked to create games that used a certain number of dice and involved addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, in the rules. It was basically a toned down version of the final game that we would be making.

A huge part of this project was incorporating exponent laws into our games. And in order for that to happen we had to first learn about what exponents were and what laws they followed. We did a multitude of Kahoot! quizzes and workbook pages to really start to understand how exponents function.

Throughout the whole project we were thinking about what we wanted our game to be. The rules, the points system, the objectives, even the game pieces. We made many drafts and had our friends test out our game constantly to see if there were any gameplay issues. Weeks later and we had our final game ready for game day. We call it “Exponent Apocalypse”, a mashup between Zombies and math. The goal is to get to the “Lab” at them end of the game board before the other player. You move up spaces by correctly answering the prompts on the cards flipped in front of you. Here, it makes more sense if you read the game rules; Exponent Apocalypse

Core Competencies 

Reasoning and Analyzing: Use logic and patterns to solve puzzles and play games

The points system in our game is quite simple, answer a question correctly and you get to move up one space. We wanted to make sure that we didn’t make it super hard or complicated to win because it’s more fun when you’re not confused half the time.

Communicating and Representing: Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms

This competency mainly focuses on the game rules themselves, if they are clear, complete, interesting, and personalized. Having an obvious theme to the game helped make the game more interesting to play because it gave it a bit of personality. We were going to add in a 5th exponent law to the game but we thought that that may get to complicated for people to remember while playing. Looking back we probably could’ve added another law without jeopardizing the simplicity of the game.

Applying and Innovating: Contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches

This year I am trying to stay more on track in class. I found that having a good partner like Faith really helped me to use my class time efficiently. Faith and I made an excellent team because our different skills worked alongside each other very smoothly.

Thank god this post is almost done

Well overall I’d say that this project was a success. I learned a lot about exponents and continued to learn about what makes a great game. Hopefully the rest of the projects this year go as smoothly as this one did.

Thanks for reading!

As Always, Brooke.