Why I KNOW I am Ready to Transition to Grade 10

To me this year was like finishing a good book. A good book requires a lot of time and a lot of thought. It is full of different characters, perspectives and experiences. But then comes the time when you come to the final chapter. You can look back and see how everything has changed form the start. This TPOL marks the end of Grade 9. It is bittersweet; there were things I loved and grew in and things that I think should have been written differently.

What I loved

I loved showing my personality more in the poem project and the Vibrant videos.

Through the poems project, I was able to show the things that shape my world view like my family, my move to BC, and my experiences with friends. In the first Vibrant Video, I showed my Iove of reading in an exaggerated and funny way. Another part of Grade 9 I really enjoyed was the revolutions on trial project. I did not know anything about Revolutions. From Nation X to the Mock trial, I feel like I learned the content better in these creative ways. To this day I can tell you a lot of facts about the Haitian Revolution.

Where I grew

Looking back on my learning plan, I see my growth throughout the year in my core competency profiles. For example, in the Communication Core Competency, I grew in my communicating. At the beginning of the year I was in profile two: “in familiar settings I communicate with peers and adults.” At the end of this year, I demonstrate a strong profile four and even some of profile five. I can “communicate clearly and purposefully using a variety of forms appropriately.”

I showed this through my Scimatics video when I used Keynote where I put together all the learning I showed in the milestones into the video. TinkerCad models, voiceover, and animations were all ways I communicated my understanding of the project.

I have also grown in the Thinking Core Competency. At the beginning of the year, my critical and reflective thinking profile was at profile two, but now, looking back at my work, I believe I am at a profile 4: “I can gather and combine new evidence with what I already know to develop reasoned conclusions, judgments, or plans”.

One way I showed this was through my Documentary for Maker. Researching games, their benefits, and interviewing Ms. Brady, I gathered evidence, made a plan, and created a documentary that clearly communicated my message. My video skills and storytelling skills also show growth. I am particularly proud of my editing in that Documentary.

Part of the Personal and Social Core Competency is personal awareness and responsibility. This is the part of the Personal and Social Core Competency that I think I grew in the most this year. At the beginning of the year, I would describe myself at profile three but now I am at profile five. I “recognize my value and advocate for my rights. I take responsibility for my choices, actions and achievements.” I showed this growth in multiple projects, but the one I am going to highlight is DI. I planned out when our group would meet, how we would meet the deadlines, and made sure I contributed using my strengths. I knew I didn’t want to write the whole script so I built the hydraulics in the mysterious object. When a group member dropped out, I helped to alter our story to adapt. 

Like a good book, there has been great character development through these projects I mentioned as well as through the the Loon Lake trip. I learned I do NOT function well without caffeine in the morning and that sitting on the ground in a basement for two hours is NOT something I enjoy. But I learned that I am very good at battle archery, that my class CAN work together through the scavenger hunt and ropes ferry, and that fans were a hot commodity. Joselyn is also really afraid of being hit by a battle archery arrow. This year, I have improved in managing and using my time well with going to LAC to not asking for extensions the day the assignment is due. The Things app has been really helpful with keeping track of what I have to do and I will continue to use that in Grade 10.

Coming to the end of a story, you also notice the things you wish had been different. I really struggle to talk to my teachers. This has always been the case for me and even though I am getting better at it, I wish I improved more. I could have had a less stressful year if I had communicated better or sooner. I think making efforts to talk to my teachers about non-school related subjects would help me feel more comfortable to communicate with them when I am stressed. Something else I really wish could be written differently is team work and peer critique. I know the importance of team work but I found my teams this year very challenging. For example, in my last exhibition, my group was full of students who would not contribute or follow through on a plan. Often times, in team work situations others do not follow instructions, which I find disrespectful to the teachers and other learners. Other students tell me not to worry about deadlines and this creates a problem for me that I have not been able to solve yet. Next year, if I were writing the story, I would have more projects where I could pick my partners. 

Finishing this book, I look forward to the next one in the series. I predict the main character will have many more struggles and problems like deadlines and too many blog posts. But there will also be adventures and growth and hopefully a field school that includes caffeine.

In my ten years in school, I have never heard my teacher say that we are going to watch a film every day in class … for weeks. To prepare for our final maker project, we watched a “doc a day”. All of these documentaries were to help us learn story telling and filming techniques so we could implement them in our own documentaries. The driving question for this project was “how can I engage and entertain an audience using my video and story telling skills?”

Our assignment was to create a 3-5 minute documentary on a topic that is meaningful to us and fulfills all the criteria that our class set out. The first challenge I face was coming up with a topic that was both meaningful to me and would have a message. Out of all of my ideas, my best two were:` social media affecting kids my age and the value of strategy games. In the end, I chose to make my documentary about strategy games because I could personalize it more.

The next thing we had to accomplish was to create a treatment and a logline. I found it difficult to say my idea in one sentence for the log line and I found that throughout the project as my vision of my documentary became more clear, I had to change and alter my logline to fit it. 

After this step, we wrote a screenplay and story board. I found the screenplay particularly challenging because it was the first time I had to fill in the details of what my documentary was going to look, and sound like. The storyboard was easy because I took what I wrote in the screen play and created a visual representation of what each shot was going to look like. 

The next step was getting the interviews and filming. Because my documentary was about strategy with a special look at the benefits of chess, I wanted to interview a person who had been playing chess for most of their life. I Could come to the Chess Club one day and interview the seniors who play there. Even though she responded, the times did not work out at all so I interviewed Ms. Brady who runs the chess club here at Seycove. I was very concerned with how I was going to film everything. I needed shots of people playing specific strategy board and card games. I ended up inviting over my friend and her sisters for a game night after school. My younger sister played games with them while I took shots from different angles. To get the credits video section I played a chess match against Gwen while taking a time-lapse video. In case you were wondering … I won!

The peer critique process was not effective except for the voluntary one I did with Teva. We exchanged iPads on our own time and watched each other’s documentaries and gave kind, helpful and specific feedback. 

I am proud of some of my editing choices. For example, I worked hard on the interview. My first draft showed the questions written on the screen paired with Ms. Brady’s answers. The interview was 2 minutes long. I decided to take away the questions on the screen and make it seem more like I was having a conversation with Ms. Brady. With every question, the screen would change to show part of a chess game being played. The overall effect was a more interesting and effective interview. 

While this project was not focused on one of the core competencies, I believe I grew in my communicating core competency when throughout this project I learned how to communicate new knowledge through the form of a documentary. I also showed growth when I had to email a person I did not know for an interview which is not something I would normally do. I really enjoyed talking to Ms. Brady because I could see more of what she enjoys to do. 

Below you will see my final film called Your Turn.

The Vibrant Video project was a short maker project that taught us the history of film making as well as many of the key steps to making a great video. Throughout the project Ms. Willemse told us the interesting history of film including the fact that the first film was of a man sneezing. The first larger scale film was of a train arriving and when audiences first saw it, they ran away because they thought the train was coming through the screen and would hit them. 

This project also taught us the process of how to make a great video. The first skill we learned was thinking like a moviemaker. We had to create a simple story with a soundtrack that set the mood. In order to keep track of my story, I wrote them down and ordered them how I thought they would go together. Then using an app called Clips, I filmed all the scenes I needed to tell my story. Then using Clips features, I added filters, stickers, posters, a soundtrack and other effects to my video to bring it to life. My film was about me reading and an exaggerated version of how I sometimes get absorbed by a book and pay attention to nothing else. 

The next skill I learned was framing shots and developing angles. To learn this skill we had to create a silent film in Clips using certain filters and posters to get an “old-time” effect. I am proud of how this video turned out and happy my friend could star in it with me. To further enhance the video, I first put the videos in iMovie to speed them up to get the look that old films have when people are walking around. I also think the music I chose fit the old fashioned theme and if you watch it without the music it looks weird. The music brings it to life.

The third skill introduced us to planning and shooting. We learned about writing a treatment, a logline, followed by a storyboard. For this skill we created a tutorial which we did as a group using an new iMovie feature. Before we started filming, we created and filled out a storyboard to grow in our planning skills and to make sure we included everything we needed to for the instructions to make sense. My team created a tutorial on how to use a vending machine which in the end turned out quite funny. 

The fourth and last skill I learned about in class, was about different effects I could use when making a film in iMovie. Unfortunately, I missed the class when we created the film with effect sequences because I was at volleyball provincials. However, I did see how a green screen can be used. 

At the end of the project, my class also had to film an interview but sadly I was sick the week they did it. I found it really fun to expand my knowledge about how to make movies and I know that will be very helpful for future PLP projects. In the future, now that I know more about making a treatment and a storyboard, I will include more of a planned out plot to my future videos. Laying out the angles and shots will help me get the purpose of my video across and using effects will make the video more interesting. 

The war to end all wars also known as World War One was the focus of this humanities project. Our driving question was “How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in WWI?”. To answer this question we did many activities and assignments but our final product was a graphic novel. The graphic novel we were to create had to be about a topic from World War1 and Canada’s involvement. I chose to do Women at War the ones holding down the home front. Before we could get to creating the graphic novel we had to learn about WW1 and how we were going to create the graphic novel. 

To start off this project, we looked at possible causes to WW1. We read about tensions in Europe especially with Austrian, Hungary and Serbia. We read about concepts like Nationalism, Militarism, Imperialism and alliances. Each one of things led to the growing tensions in Europe. I then had to write a paragraph about what we thought the main cause was of WW1. I had a lot of trouble choosing one because I believe there were many things that made WW1 happen. In the end, I decided that WW1 would not have happened at that time if it wasn’t for the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Later, closer to the end of the project, we thought about the consequences of WW1, both the immediate and the long term ones.  For example, an immediate consequence was the loss of life and infrastructure in many countries in Europe. A long term consequence was the weapon development like the use of tanks, machine guns, and chemical warfare. These were created around WW1 in a larger scale and have been around ever since then. These two parts of the project connect to the curricular competency: Analyze Cause and Consequence. When I look back at my understanding, on Cause and Consequences, I think I did a very detailed job on this competency. I feel that I have a thorough understanding of the complicated causes of the war and also of the consequences. 

Aside from the Nelson Text pages we read, we read The War to End All Wars 1914-1918 written by Alan Cowsill. This graphic novel informed us about many battles in the war and gave us a visual about what was happening at this time. Many parts of the novel was from the perspective of a soldier which was a very interesting choice. I had only heard of WW1 with some facts but the soldier’s perspective helped me to understand what it was actually like to be in WW1. It was interesting to see how all the relationships between the countries such as the alliances that were made, who supported who and why they supported them. Another interesting part to see was the propaganda that countries would use to get more men to join. They would guilt them, scare them and make men feel that it was an honourable thing to do to make their country proud. The graphic novel mentions the story about the famous story about the men who took a break at Christmas. I wondered, if they could take a break and be happy together, then why were they really fighting? It seems like the war really had nothing to do with the average person. 

Looking at the War to End All Wars 1914-1918 graphic novel prepared me to create my own graphic novel, which was the final product. This final product would show the curricular competency of Create Effectively which means “Effectively incorporating technical and narrative writing within a comic panel”. My chosen topic was Women at War=: those holding down the home front. For this topic I needed to research, use at least two sources, create a 5 W page, storyline and story board before I could even start the graphic novel. My topic was more challenging then I thought because I could not find exact dates and events of women here at Canada because most people were paying attention to the War and not as much as to what was happening here in Canada. Another challenge for me was creating the images for the graphic novel. Because there were not many photographs in my sources, there were not many to trace to then use for the graphic novel. I also found it very hard to actually to draw. However, when I look at my final product, I believe I was able to communicate what I wanted to say. 

Overall, when I think about this topic, I think that WW1 was a waste of life. I recognize that it is hard to understand all the different perspective, thoughts and ideas that went into the war. I might never fully understand why it happened and what the point was. It seemed like a lot of tension over land and power and at the end of the war it looked quite similar even with some land and power shift. I would hope that today we would have better ways of dealing with regional and national disagreements.

“The 7 habits of highly effective teens” by Sean Covey is the book that we have been focusing on for the past three months. In maker, for this project, we have been working on answering the driving question “How can I use the 7 habits to be my most effective self”? We were given the option of reading three books: the one for people, teenagers, or a graphic novel, and I chose to do the one for teenagers written by Sean covey. The book was separated into four parts and for each part we completed a workbook and a choice board activity. To answer this question I have read, practiced and shown my understanding of the 7 habits. This final blog post is titled “Believe in Good” because our final product will demonstrate how in the future I am going to use the 7 Habits to be a more effective teenager. 

The Process

Highlights from my Choice Board Assignments:

I am really proud of most of my Choice Board assignments. They were all different and all showed the part of the 7 habits I needed to show representing my understanding of my learning. 

• • Paradigms: For my first choice board I took a photo up close of my brother’s hair and then a photo further back. You can’t tell what the first photo is without seeing the second picture.
  • Private Victory: For my second choice board I used the app Sketches Pro to create notes with graphics. These notes were about each of the first three habits to show how my brain remembers the learning from this section. The images represent an idea.
  • Public Victory: For my third choice board, I created a Keynote animation that clearly shows habits four, five and six. My focus was on visual representation.
  • Renewal: For my last choice board, I created a playlist to represent the four sections of habit 7, Sharpening the Saw. 
  • Overall, throughout the choice boards I was able to grow my skills in using ipad apps I had not used as much as the others such as animating in keynote. I showed I was a creative communicator through the variety of ways I represented my knowledge of the 7 habits. 

Highlights from the Workbook:

• The workbooks made me think about the 7 habits and how they could apply to my life. For example, I found it very interesting to look at my personal bank account assignment and discover how many withdrawals I have in a week. 

Highlights from the Notes Chart:

• My notes chart helped me to remember the main ideas of the 7 habits, especially when I was doing the choice board activities. Using my ipad to construct my understanding was one way I showed myself to be an empowered learner. Even though my notes to some people, may not make sense, they help remind me about what this whole book has been about which is developing habits that will make me an effective human.

The Final Products of My Learning

Our final product needed to demonstrate my learning of the habits by connecting them with the core competencies. This meant that the habits would be shown within three products to relate to the three core competencies: communicating, thinking, and personal and social. Even more challenging, we also needed each product to focus on communicating knowledge in a different style such as visual, audio and kinesthetic.

Communicating/Visual

With a focus on the communicating core competency, I chose to represent my learning of habits 5 and 6 in a visual way. I decided to create a photo Collage of group projects. This visual display demonstrates my growth in collaboration skills. We have had a variety of projects that require working in a group such as DI, Revolutions on trial, metaphor machines. Seeing all these photos showcases all the skills I have to use when I work in a group.

The next competency I reviewed was thinking which I chose to represent my learning of habits 1, 2, and 3 in an auditory way. I created an audiobook recording of me talking about future jobs I could have and ways I could accomplish those goals. 

The final core competency are personal and social skills which I chose to connect to Habits 4 and 7 in a kinesthetic way. Since building relaxes me and allows me to show my creativity, I decided to make a fort. I like to be in comfortable places and forget the world around me. I also love being with my family/friends and decided that building with my friend Maya would be something we both enjoy and a way for me to recharge.

All of these assignments and products ultimately are good evidence that I am becoming more of an empowered learning and that I can construct and communicate my knowledge in many, many, different ways. I will continue to build my skills in the 7 habits and bring good into my life. 

Destination Imagination is a tournament using your team’s skills and abilities in science, technical, fine arts and improv. In this blog post I will summarize my team’s process of creating our DI challenge and I will also talk about my growth as a learner.

I was put into a group of 5 (Fraser, Zach, Cale, Sabrina)  and assigned the Scientific challenge. During our Maker class we started organizing and preparing for the tournament. There were lots of parts to the challenge but the main idea is that characters travel into a microworld and at least one of those characters encounter a mysterious object. We also had to include a technical method, 3D microworld scenery, microscopic imaging technique and two team choice elements. For our story, we decided to write a plot where three scientists and Uncle Frank accidentally travel into a bacterial cell. When in the cell, they find a mysterious object that they think is useless. They also interact with 3D scenery including some ribosomes which we represented through balloons. In trying to find a way out the scientists find that the wall of the cell is covered with fluorescents which they can see with a black light flashlight. Later when Uncle Frank trips on the mysterious object, again, he picks it up and presses two buttons. These buttons used hydraulics, our  technical method, to open the box. Inside the box there were other parts of the cell tagged with fluorescents and when the characters touched that they were transported back to the lab. During our story, we also displayed two team choice elements. The first one was musical. Zach created music on an app on his iPad which we used when Uncle Frank enters the lab. The second team choice element was a poem written by Fraser and myself which was read by Uncle Frank. It showed the idea that he thought very highly of himself which was a funny part of the performance. It took a long time to plan everything out and make it. My favourite part of the project was when we actually got to create the items and I did not enjoy the planning as much. We designed the microworld scenery, the mysterious object and all the items in the lab. Mostly we used cardboard to construct these items but we also used balloons, glow in the dark paint and hydraulics. The rest of our set used items from home and our costumes involved lab coats and a cowboy hat and plaid for Uncle Frank.

I showed the most growth in my collaborative and personal social skills. The collaborating part was challenging with communicating with my team and setting up time to get work done. Some of my team members did not show up for the morning and after school practices we had decided on doing. When we started building our sets we communicated better and work together in a more collaborative way. For personal and social skills I improved on speaking up when team mates did not come to the decided on meetings. Since, we didn’t have much time before the tournament and one of our team members had to drop out of the performance,  our meetings were very important. In the end, I was happy with the way our project came together and with our performance at the tournament. We got third in our age group in our challenge.

Another thing we did well was adding humour and puns to our performance because we wanted it to be interesting and the appraisers were fans of puns. The pun were did at the beginning of the performance when the asked if we were ready was: “We have our ions on the prize!” At the beginning of DI this year, I did not have an open mind and I was not certain I would enjoy it since last year was all on video. Although there times when I did not LOVE the project, I did have a lot of fun and am happy with our end result.

Metaphor Machines, that is the name of my most recent scimatics project. For this project the driving questions we had to answer were “How can we represent the scientific method? And What factors affect the function and efficiency of electric circuits?”. I answered these questions with all the stepping stones, worksheets, and milestones that all contributed to the end product, a metaphor machine. 

We started off this project with a start mind map to write down the knowledge I already had about electrical circuits and the scientific method. Then just a few days ago I added to that mind map with the knowledge I have learn though out this project. 

Start mind map:

End mind map:

After the start mind map we did workbooks to learn more about electrical circuits. We also did an experiment on parallel and series circuits. Before we could do the experiment we needed to test the voltage and current in a science simulator. I found the simulator very helpful because it meant I could visually see what the workbooks were talking about.  

We also took a khan academy test on scale diagrams. I found this really difficult to do but in the end I understood what the test was about. After the test we drew our own scale drawings of what we thought our metaphor machines could look like. I had some trouble with showing all the steps in the scientific process but in the end i love the creativity that came with putting it all together. 

Here is my individual blueprint:

We ended off this project with the final product a metaphor machine that shows the 7 steps of the scientific process. I worked in a group of four to create this metaphor machine and a final scale drawing blueprint of it. My group had a lot of trouble getting the machine to work. We especially had trouble with the questioning step where we had a cup move down with the added weight of a marble. In the end we did get everything to work and we did show all 6 steps of the scientific method. We then took a video with voiceovers to show our machine.

Curricular competencies:

Questions and predicting: Demonstrate a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. 

I think I did an accomplished job on this competency as i used all my class time efficiently and went to lac during class time to work on workbooks without distractions. I also showed this competency when my group fell behind on our machine and came in during flex time to try to finish building the circuits part of the metaphor machine.   

Reasoning and Analyzing: Estimate reasonably.

I showed how I accomplished this competency in the math test, individual blueprints and in the final blueprint. The math test took me long but i did get to understand how draw things The final blueprint has a grid scale, all lines are easy to see, and it is complete and accurate. 

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

I think my team and I did a good job one this curricular y competency. We hand built all the machine parts including the circuits. We included in our machine both a working parallel and series circuit that were turned on at different times. We included our circuit diagrams in our final blueprint.  

Scientific Communication: Formulate physical or mental models to describe a phenomenon

I think my team did really well on this part of the project. We created a video with the whole machine working and slow motion videos of every part of the scientific method. All six of the steps were clearly shown in the video and explained in the voice overs. One thing I think we did really well on was that to show the observe step one of my teammates created a spiral with an eye on it. 

I really enjoyed the creativity of creating a metaphor machine out of cardboard, wood, and anything else we could find. I did find it hard closer to the end of the project to get the whole machine to work and I am very glad I came early during flex time to work on it. This was a very cool project where I got to grow my knowledge on scale drawing and electrical circuits. 

“How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?” That was the question that drove this whole project. The end product was an Instagram post that was all about how different nations show nationalism. We each chose one of the topics in basecamp related to nationalism for our post. I chose to do french nationalism in Canada, because I was introduced to it when we learned about the colonization of Canada, but I was was interested in learning more. 

To start off this project we had to learn a lot about our own topic which started with understanding the idea of historical perspective. While we were doing our research, we were discussing about how certain statues are being torn down and if they should be left up, put in the museum, or maybe just take it down in a different way. We learned about how our perspective today is different than the perspectives at that time and how what those leaders did back then was thought of as OK, but today we would consider it wrong. I showed this curricular competency of understanding historical perspective in the confederation simulation assignment, where we were put in teams. My team and I had to figure out if our group wanted to join the constitution. I was in the Nova Scotia group where I studied about their perspective at the time, what they needed with the confederation, what they didn’t need, and what they believed in.

We also did a current events project where we had to communicate a current event that was happening in the world today that showed nationalism. I chose to do the emergency act extending in Canada because that hasn’t happened in a really long time.  I was very interested to read up more about it because I had never heard of it before. I discussed my research in a small group which went very well. Another way I showed the communicate compellingly curricular competency, was in a caption to go with my French nationalism images. I collaborated with my teammates ( Brooke, Zach, and Declan) to make a better one altogether. This is the one we created.  

 This caption was put together through all the research and evidence we had found out about our topic earlier in the project. I also showed this competency with my opinion writing piece where I communicated my thoughts on French-Canadian nationalism back in the 1700s to early 1900s with evidence from multiple different sources. In my opinion piece I wrote about how French nationalism has always been showed in Canada. It was showed in New France, in the lower Canada rebellion, and Canada wouldn’t be the same without it.     

Aside from writing and discussing, a way that I communicated my view and what happened was through the three images that I had to create.  I created three images that show the story of French nationalism in Canada starting with the time of new France. Discovering and designing which images that would be most powerful was more challenging than I had thought. Then, with my group we chose four images to put in the Instagram post. 

My images

My team and my Images.  

Now with both the images and captions done, the teacher put together our

instagram post.   

To conclude, I think I’ve showed a lot of learning growth throughout this project. I’m more comfortable with sharing my opinion like I did in the current events assignment and confederation simulation project. I am also getting better at communicating my opinion with the images and opinion piece. My collaborative skills improved with this project which was shown with how I worked with my group when deciding what caption should be our final caption, and in the end we chose a bit from everybody’s. Overall, throughout this project I’ve really enjoyed learning more about French nationalism in Canada over the past few centuries. I find it very interesting the different ways that they show their culture and language throughout the many challenges that were placed ahead of them and how they still show their nationalism today.