Hi everyone and welcome to my first blog post of grade 11!! After two months of summer where I did pretty much nothing (just like the rest of quarantine) I’m really excited to get back to my learning. Plus now we actually get to be in class – shocking I know! With the new hybrid “quadmester” system at Seycove my entire first PLP project was taught 50% online and 50% in person. Ms Maxwell split our 11/12 class into two groups, the Eagles and the Wolves. I was a Wolf which meant I came into class on Wednesday and Friday afternoons unlike the Eagles who came in Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The whole class met on zoom every Monday to discuss what we would be doing that week and as a way to have communication among the two groups.

Ok enough of the logistics I’m sure you’re eager to learn what our first PLP project back was. Unlike regular socials classes where we probably would’ve studied some old war we had the opportunity to study and learn about our own home. That’s right, each student chose one topic in Deep Cove and studied it’s history. This project was super cool for me because, while I have lived here my entire life, my parents immigrated from England and so I knew very little of the early history of the Cove. With the information gathered about everyone’s individual Deep Cove topic we put together a walking tour in collaboration with Deep Cove Heritage Society. Our walking tour included a digital Google map, a printed out pamphlet, a sources document, a video of the locations, and then audio clips, an informational “blurb”, and digital enhancements on the individual topic markers. To get all the final group work together everyone had different roles as well as Eagles being responsible for the Google map and the Wolves being responsible for the pamphlet. It got stressful at the end but we pulled it off and I’m very happy with our final product

The first core competency that I’m going to talk about is the one I believed I showed the best work in. This is the Writing and Designing Text core competency. For my topic I chose Mount Seymour Little League as it’s the kids baseball league I’ve played in since I was 5 and I have many contacts within the league. I really like the feeling of community in Myrtle Park and the league so I wanted to make that a highlight of my information and storytelling. At first I wrote a long paragraph that gave a brief history of what Little League as a whole was and then how our local Deep Cove one is the same and or different. This was good however to meet the 50-100 word requirement for the pamphlet blurb I had to rearrange my story so that it still made sense but could be shorter. I used formal and correct grammar while still trying to make the park look fun. My goal was to get some of the basic history of the league and how it has such a welcoming and nice reputation. I included statistics and dates so I had information but made sure to tell a story in my writings. I believe both my shortened story for the marker blurb and my longer writeup which then became my audio clip are both good examples of how I demonstrated that I can use writing and design to plan, develop, and create engaging and meaningful texts.

Another core competency I’d like to bring up is taking historical perspective. In this project the social studies aspect was about looking at your location or topic from multiple perspectives to see if that changed the way it seemed. At first I was really struggling with this as most of the people I know who are engaged in the league have a similar opinion but then I had the idea to focus on the perspective of someone from the past compared to the perspective of someone now. I decided to make my digital enhancement an interview with Gary and Julie Tattrie. The Tattries are a Deep Cove family that have lived here for multiple generations and the father (Gary) played in Mount Seymour Little League as a kid and now coaches two kids of his own in the same league. For the interview I called Gary, since an in-person interview would have presented a social distancing challenge, and then asked each question and recorded both Julie and Gary’s answers. The idea was to compare the perspective of a 10 year old girl who has played in the league for only five years, to an adult man who played in the league for 10 years in the 80s and is now back coaching. While they’re answers definitely had some quite big differences they both brought up the feeling of community within Myrtle and the league. I then made a slideshow comparing their answers and uploaded that on my blog so people could click a link and see for themselves. I also had to come up with another perspective in my marker blurb as I didn’t have enough space to talk about Julie and Gary. I instead discussed how before Myrtle Park’s renovations in the 60s it was a lot less popular as there was much less to do there.

A core competency I definitely could’ve done better on in this unit was the using resources competency. Since this league is a pretty small local thing most of the information came from people familiar with the league or from the league website. Unfortunately the website didn’t include any information about the foundation of the league or its early years. I was able to find some information about early Myrtle Park in Echoes Across Seymour and got some old images of the park from the North Vancouver Museum Archives. There was not a lot of information on this subject but I believe if I would’ve gone a little deeper on my searches or if I would’ve tried to reach out to more contacts in the league I could’ve gotten more sources. This was also an example of the challenge of Covid-19 times, as I had a lead on a box of MSLL history information, but tracking it down when league volunteers are currently living in separate bubbles proved impossible in the time available. In future projects I need to make sure I’m getting enough different sources to get multiple perspectives and get accurate and engaging information.

Overall I would say this project was a success for me but not my best work. I had just come back to school after being out for a long time and I had to train myself to get back my old learning habits. I wasn’t helped by the fact that I chose a topic without much information but I still believe I could’ve done more. For example when we chose our roles to help with the group work I chose the role of printer because I have a colour printer so I could be a resource but also because I wasn’t sure how much work I wanted to take on as my other class this quad is Physics. This was my biggest mistake of the whole project. I found myself constantly wanting to do more and help out. Having this experience has reminded me that I like to be a leader and I like to challenge myself and be busy with work. Going forward I’m always going to go for the harder positions or ways to do projects because that’s the fun of school. Unfortunately the big quarantine break made me forget that. That being said I still am proud of the work I did on my individual marker and I was super engaged with class always doing things on time and being a part of the conversations. This project is what I needed to get back into the school mindset and I’m so excited for the rest of the school year and to keep growing and learning.