Hello everyone welcome to another post. This is my last gr.8 humanities post 😢 I hope you enjoy.
Our last unit this year was colonization!! In this unit we learned about New France, the colonization of North America, Shakespeare and our final project for this year was 🔥🔥🔥 (you’ll see why later) now let’s get started.
We started off this unit with (just like most units) getting put into groups. In my group was Keira, Izzy, and Ben. Once this was done we moved on to Shakespeare. The play we studied was the Tempest. It was of course written by Shakespeare. To make this play we were given an app that had all the the lines and a summary of every part of every act in the play. Our other very challenging task was to set the play in New France. So of course we had to learn about it to be able to incorporate it into the play.
The first thing we looked at in this unit was colonization. We looked at a comic that showed the steps to colonizing a place and how to get the locals on your side.
These are the four steps of colonization. The steps are
1. Reconnaissance
2. Invasion
3. Occupation
4. Assimilation
If you want an explanation of what each word means read the comic for more.
We then moved on to New France it’s self. We learned about the pyramid of power and the different types of people living in New France. The rankings are below.
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the first science post ever on this blog. This post takes place in the amazing classroom run by the fantastic Ms. S. Klausen. In this unit we learn about light, optics, mirrors reflections and refractions!
We started of this unit with a work sheet about the basics of light. My partner for this was Ben. After this we watched a video about how animals use light to survive and use it for even more amazing stuff!
After we watch the video we learned about convex and concave lenses and how they alter light.
To demonstrate the power of lenses we went out side with a big concave lens and used the sun to burn a girl guides cookie box.
!!WARNING!! NO GIRL GUIDE COOKIES WERE HARMED IN THE PHOTOS YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE…. WE HAD ALREADY EATEN THE COOKIES 😀😀
We also watch this video about the biggest solar furnace in the world which is so hot that it will melt birds that fly close to it.
We then got with different partners and we worked on a BFLL which stands for Big Fat Lenses Lab. My partner for this labs was Mr. Sam Cui. For this lab we study light rays after they passed through a liquid. The liquids we used for this lab were vegetable oil, water and rubbing alcohol.
Oil
Water
Alcohol
The other big thing that we did in this unit was watch a Documentary on light in Islam. Which was a video about a guy who talked about a dead guy who proved the Greeks wrong about how light works. The Greeks said that light came from the eye but he proved that light entered the eye instead. He also wrote a famous book called Kitab al-Manazir or the book of optics in English. As well most of the thing we know about light came from him.
I know I did a terrible job at explaining this so go ahead and watch the video for more information, and if you really want there is an entire series about this so feel free to watch them all if you desire.
Thank you dear reader for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post. This is everything we’ve work in in science this term.
Hello world how you doing today? Today I’m writing about exploring is the 16th century. The purpose of this unit was to understand why explorers were sailing in search of new land.
The explorer I chose was Henry Hudson and the first thing we had to do was some research about our explorers to get to understand them better. The research sheet looked a lot like this.
Now your probably thinking PLP is supposed to be slightly more difficult then regular school and yes I know that research is pretty easy but we had a lot more going on on top of this.
At the same time we were researching our explorers we were also doing a novel study on comics. There were 4 different types of comics and each group was assigned a different genre of comic expach week the different genres of comics were Tintin, Anti-Hero, New Age, and Superhero. At the end of each week we had to fill out a comic chart and discuss the genre of comic with our groups.
My group made up of Taylor, Keira, Gabby, Aedan, and I all had basically the same thoughts on all the comics and genres.
On top of all that we also had to make our own comics. This is the reason why we were doing a novel study on comics. You can see mine later on in this post.
One not so great thing that happened was that Ms Willemse was in Cuba during this unit so we had a sub. Our sub was really great and she was very informative but she was not Ms. Willemse.
Now the reason we were doing all of this is because the final project for this unit was we had to present to the king and queen to convince them to fund me for an expedition. Luckily my friends filmed me so I could show it to you people.
Reflection
I learned a lot in this unit like how to use a lot of different apps like superimpose and many others. I also learned a lot about the navigational tool used in that time period as well as how much trading impacted countries around the world.
Thank you for reading and I’ll see u in the next one 👋.
Hi everyone welcome back to another amazing post! In this post I will be talking about something very interesting and something you probably have never done.
One thing in PLP that we do a lot is projects and in some of those projects we use something called the L.A.U.N.C.H. cycle. Launch stands for
L stands for look, listen, and learn about the project
A stands for ask questions about the project
U stand for understanding the problem
N stands for navigate and brainstorm ideas
C stands for create a prototype
and H stands for highlight the good and fix the bad
The project we have been working on in maker the last 2 weeks have helped me understand the launch cycle a lot better.
Now the project, our task was to make an interesting sport with the materials of 2 racquets, string, duct tape, 6 balloons, 5 cups and a wiffle ball. My group made up of Jason, Grace and Taylor had some interesting ideas about what we could do with the supplies.
One of the first things we did when we were creating our sport was to make a survey to see what aspects of a sport our other classmates liked. My question was, What body parts do you like to play sports with? As you can see in the survey below most people in my class like to use multiple body parts when playing.
The next step was to brainstorm questions that people might ask before they play our sport. We made a web on a piece of paper and went around the group writing any questions that we had even if they were really obvious. After we did it as a group, we then went around to the other groups webs and added anything they might of missed. After everyone went around to all the webs ours look like this.
The next thing we did was we got to play around with the materials to get a better idea of what we wanted to use them as.
Once we had our concrete idea we had to make a video about rules and how to play the game.
Once we did all that it was time to launch to an audience. Our audience was another group that designed another sport with the same materials. We set up and started to play our game. It was lots of fun and the inspiration for the name came from Taylor.
Some images when we were playing.
And that was our sport. I hope you enjoy playing llama ball and I’ll see you in the next post 👋
Hello welcome to another humanities post. This one is on the renaissance! And everything that happened of the feudal age. Which basically changed the world as we know it.
What is the Renaissance?
The Renaissance was the time when most of the greatest well known minds lived. Renaissance means rebirth or reawakening so when you think of it that way the Renaissance was the turning point in technology and the principle beliefs which shaped the world into what we know today.
This unit was broken up into 3 main ideas that as you will see all fall into one big project.
The Changing Ideas
In this part of the unit we study famous Renaissance people. Each person was given a Renaissance thinker, a scientist or mathematician and an artist. We then had to fill in a triple Venn diagram with the things they had in common relating to how they helped reshape the world.
The spreading of ideas
For this part of the unit we looked at how the new ideas from the people we study above spread throughout the world. For this assignment we had to fill out a cause and effect blossom to show this.
The impact of ideas
The final piece of this unit was how the ideas from the Renaissance impacted our worldview today. This was basically the part where we summarized everything we learned in this unit so far.
The final project
Now your probably wondering what the importance of these three assignments are. For all you know I just put these in here for no reason but I actually did. The reason I put this all in is because we turned these three assignments in to….. A Triptych!
A triptych is three images next to each other. They can go together to make one whole image but they have to all tell a story individually as well. This was our final project for the unit and you can see mine right here ⬇️.
Reflection time!
I learned a lot in this unit the Renaissance was a very interesting topic. The thing I think I most improved on are my photo shopping skills as well as expanding my knowledge on the Renaissance. One thing I need to work on is time management, so that I don’t have to stay up late trying to finish assignments and all that.
Hey dear reader I’m back with another Destination Imagination or DI post. If you haven’t seen my first post about DI then you can click here to go read it. If you don’t want waste your time reading that post and want to find out what Destination Imagination is click right here for more.
Hopefully you read my first DI post if not you can read it here (this is your last chance). Now you have definitely read my first post so you know something about DI.
My group of Ben,Anika,Gabby and me were put into the challenge maze craze. For our challenge we had to…..
Because you have read my regionals post you will know what our solutions were to each challenge, but let’s recap anyways.
Our device or maze traveler was a toy loader that we modified to make it work in our performance. For our prop transformation we customized the shovel so that it could hold liquid yeast. Then we had a container with other liquid in it that the maze traveler was supposed to pour the yeast into but as you will see in the video later on in this post it turn out to be very…. challenging. For the object removal we decided to tape popsicle sticks to the back of our maze traveler then stick a magnet on it to remove a key from the maze.
I thought our story was very well written given that we are only kids. Click Here to read the script.
Now for our team choice elements. Our first element was our costumes as you will see in the video further into this post we all had homemade costumes which were pretty good if I do say so myself. Our second team choice element was the makeup for the monster in our story which was played by me. We made a video of Anika, Ben, and Gabby applying the makeup to add to our performance.
How we improved from regionals!
As you all probably know I am in the PLP program. In PLP we strive to improve our work as much as possible so DI was a great opportunity for us to practice this. We improved our maze travelers shovel, re-wrote some of the story, and made a backdrop to project our video on.
The worst part of DI!
The worst thing that happened the entire time we did DI was that Gabby couldn’t make provincials because she was at a cadet thing(you should click on her name visit her post because she explained it in much more detail)but because Gabby couldn’t make it Ben had to take over her role. Now this is bad because our script is written for four people no more and definitely no less. So now we had a problem because we didn’t know she couldn’t make it till a week before the performance and we didn’t have time to re-write the script.
Our solution💡
Ben was originally the driver for the maze traveler but he change roles to become the main character Demos.
Anika role stayed the same as the narrator but she had to do a bit of the driving.
My role changed quite a bit, I was just the monster in our first performance but now I also had the task of driving the maze traveler.
Why we do DI?
After reading two post about it your probably wondering why do they do DI? The answer, acording to this study with you can find right here. Kids that get involved in DI are much more creative and are able to problem solve much better compare to kids that don’t do DI. Which to sum it all up is what we do a lot in PLP.
Thank you dear reader for reading yet another post by me and I’ll see you in the next one 👋.
Hello again, it’s me, back with another post and guess what? this one’s about Destination Imagination! Ok, before I officially start this post, there’s one thing I’m not going to explain: what Destination Imagination is, because it’s really hard to do in text. If you want to learn more about it, click here.
Now, I’m going to officially start the post. Hopefully, you’ve clicked the link and found out what DI is. If you didn’t, go do it now!
First, Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Willemse put us into groups of four. I got put into the Maze Craze challenge and it was so much fun to work with my group members Gabby, Anika, and Ben.
Once we got to understand our challenge better, our next step was to create our team name. After a lot of brainstorming and careful consideration, we decided on the name The Improbable Impossibles! Now, the explanation for the name is, it is improbable that we won’t complete the impossible.
Hopefully, you watched the video that’s right there ⬆️. If you haven’t, you should now. Anyway, the next thing we did was decide how we were going to solve our challenge. Just before I do this there is something very important that you should see before you read on, and that is our team roles.
Team roles are very important because if two people in the group are having an argument about something, we can look to the team roles chart we made to see who has the final decision. If you would like to see my groups chart it will be right there⬇️ for you to look at.
Our first idea was to build a remote controled car but no one in our group knew how and unfortunately for us YouTube wasn’t the most helpful in this situation. So our second idea was to buy a remote controlled truck and take everything off so it was just the chassis and then use that. Lucky for us this idea worked! So once we had that all figured out it was time to start.
I’m going to take a minute now to explain something called an instant challenge. Now I can’t say to much as I’m sworn to secrecy but I can explain the jist of it. So an instant challenge is exactly what it sound like. You show up on the day of the competition and try and complete the challenge. You don’t know anything about the challenge except that it’s either going to be a performance based meaning you have to act or sing, tasked based where you have to build something or a mixture of both. So on top of having to solve our main challenge we also had to practice the instant challenges
If you watched the video you would know that we also had to include a prop transformation and an object removal. Our idea for the transformation was the use chemistry and make elephant toothpaste. To make this even cooler we decided to design the maze traveler to set it off.
Our idea for the object removal was to use magnets. Our object was a key and we glued a magnet to it and then glued a magnet to the maze traveler.
Now to explain the title. You know how I said that we designed the maze traveler to make the elephant toothpaste. Well on the day of the competition the shovel we modified to carry the liquid started to leak when we tested it by pouring water into it. Our first solution was to duck tape up the holes. Once we did that, we tried the water again but the tape didn’t cover the holes because we had moss hot glued to the sides of the shovel. So we decided that I would just pour the liquid into the container to trigger the reaction. Now if you want to watch our entire performance you can see it right here ⬇️.
The appraisers gave us some sticky notes on the things that they liked, and on stuff that they think we can improve. We also got raw scores, which are the exact amount of points we got for each bit of the challenge.
Our raw scores
Sticky notes
To rap this up we ended up getting third place out of 7 teams, which, when you think about it is pretty good.
Third place ribbon
This is the end of the post thank you for reading, peace out
Hello everyone I have an interesting blog post for today. This one is on poetry. Now if you didn’t know I’m not a big fan of poetry, But I decided to give it a shot. In this unit we covered all the different types of poems such as ABC, haiku, and metaphors just to name a few. We also had to keep a page that included all of the definitions that we learned. On top of all this we had to write one of each of the poems we learned and put them all into a book, and to make things even harder all the poems had to be about aspects of our worldview.
My poetry terms and definitions!
What I learned
In this unit I learned a lot about poetry. I also deepened I understanding of how to book creator and unfortunately I am still not a fan of poetry. I gave it a good go but it’s still one of my least favourite things about school.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see u in the next one.
Being in PLP we have to do two SCL’s (student lead conferences) a year. Because I am in Gr.8 this year this is my first one. A SLC presentation is about 12 minutes long. 7 of those minutes are for me the student to talk all about the stuff I’ve learned this year and what to do better for the rest. The other 5 are for the parents and the teachers to ask me questions about my work, learning, and presentation.
What I did great
My favourite thing we’ve done all year is the religion unit because religion has always been one of those things that where your curious about it but you don’t know where to start because their are some many differ religions. Another reason I loved that unit is because we got really good critique from my classmates, Ms. Willemese, and some advice from Mr. Hughes.
This was our first draft. The critique we got was to add icons and change the background picture.
Our second draft was better but was still a far ways from being done. Some great advice we got was change the crescent to green and add more content.
Although by then we had already made all the decisions we just ran out of time to do them all.
To read the entire worldview and religion post click here.
Another one of the things I’m proud of is the Star Wars exhibition. Although it was a lot more in-depth than any of the other projects that we have done so far I really liked it after it was over, because while it was going on I was stressed like crazy. But I was ready for the day of the presentation and one of the biggest things I learned is that procrastination is not good at all.
The frustrating work
There was only a couple of the big things that got me frustrated so far this year. One was the advertising unit because I kept rushing through each draft and ended up having to do 18 different drafts. Now because of that learning experience I learned that speed isn’t always the best, and that I should slow down when doing assignments because I might miss something or come up with an even better idea.
Some of the ad drafts that I did.
The other was the door is a bore project in math. It was really fun but really frustrating because we didn’t check each other’s calculations so we end up almost having to restart after 2 weeks of hard work. But we used our problem solving skills as well as some help from Ms. Klausen to figure out a solution. To read the full story click here.
The bad stuff
The worst piece of work that I have done this year was probably the growth mindset unit in maker. The reason I think this is because I procrastinated a lot of the work in that unit, mostly because it was the start of the year and because I over estimated my abilities.
Myself as a learner
Now reflecting back on the year so far and the rest of the year to come I have a bunch of things that I’m going to change and somethings that I’m going to keep. A couple of things that are going to change are I’m not going to procrastinate every thing I’m going to get everything I need to get done done before it gets to late. Another thing I’m going to change is I’m not going to over estimate my abilities. Some things that I am not changing are reading, staying in PLP.
So this post is a little different than the other posts. This one is about math!! Now this is the first blog post about math but it’ll still be great. So here we go.
The start of the first project we did in math was a lot of what we did in humanities. But first the project, to turn increase the door belows surface area by five using shapes.
After we got the assignment we were divided into groups of four my group was composed of Jordyn, Paisley, and Luciano. Our first step was to do our calculations on how much surface area we needed and what shape we needed to make. After making a ton of calculations we decided to go with a triangular prism with the dimensions of, height of 40 cm, length/depth of 26 cm, and width of 24 cm. But then disaster struck, the paper wasn’t big enough for our measurements. Then we got an idea. We could just half the measurements and double the amount of shapes we would make. So instead of 6 shapes we made 12 that looked like this.
But then after spending 320 minutes making them we taped them to the door and found out the our calculations were way off!!!!!!! 😭😭😭. So then it was time to put our problem solving skills to the test. We were just under half way to the surface area that we needed to achieve. Then we had a brilliant idea 💡 we could open up the tops of the shapes and that would double our surface area. So we did but we were still short about 90 cm2 so we made a little cube to go on as well.
After you do a building task you have to write a technical report on everything that you did and what you would do differently. So my groups is right here.
Now if you read it says that are percentage error was -0.005% which means we went over by 0.005. The reason why is because the side lengths of the cube was some how changed by 1 more then it was suppose to be and the error was so small it doesn’t really matter.
The final door with all the shapes from all the groups was quite spectacular, as it had all different colours and shapes.
Refection time 😀
Now after doing the entire project I have increased my understanding of shapes and surface area. One of the key things I learned is that never let just one person do the calculations and just agree with it, because if we had checked our calculations before we started making the shapes we would of known that our calculations were off.
So that’s all for this blog post hope you have great rest of your day and thanks for stopping by to read this.
