It’s the end of the year again, meaning it’s time for tPOLs. I want to share some of the work that I’m especially proud of this year because I feel that I worked hard on my work this year and I’ve really grown as a learner from the beginning of the year to the end.
To start off, here are some projects that I’m proud of. These are all projects that I spent a lot of my time on and worked hard to make sure they showed the effort I put in.
The first project that I will mention is my World War I comic book. We worked for over a month to create a comic book that told the story of a group of people, a piece of technology, or an event that shaped the 1st World War. I chose to research and write about The Battle of Vimy Ridge, a battle in France. This battle was the first time that Canada had fought independent from Britain and was a major turning point to Canadian identity. I worked very hard on my comic strip and I am proud of how it turned out because I held myself to a high standard and I feel that my work showed the effort and time I put in to research and create my final product. I worked on this with Isy, and so my comic only shows half of the full story we created. I will link her blog post here if you would like to look at the second half. Here is my section that I wrote if that interests you.
Next, I want to talk a bit about Destination Imagination. As much as we all complain about it, I did learn a lot from it this year. I went more into detail about it in this post, but I’ll cover the basic outline of it. We had to create a short 2 part musical with a set, a set change, and a big memorable spectacle. The reason that I am proud of this project is because of how we worked to overcome all of the issues that came up and how we were efficient in the production of our presentation. We created a set that used a drill to spin a background down, but after it failed to work at the first competition we had to rethink our idea. We ended up completely rebuilding our set to work even better. We strengthened the pole that spun, changed the drill to a smaller one, and made the backdrop that spun down a little bigger and easier to use. Some of the songs that we wrote weren’t engaging enough for the audience, so I spent a lot of time in order to rewrite them to be more entertaining. All of our hard work paid off in the end though, and we ended up with first place in the provincial tournament.
The third project I feel very proud of is my Metaphor Machine. The goal of this unit was to create a fully operational Rube Goldberg machine to show a major revolution in history through metaphors. My group chose to do the American revolution. I’m very proud of this work because I put in many hours of time at lunch and after school to work on this project. After we created each section of the machine, we would have to think outside the box to find a new way for each piece to work together. This took lots of time and effort, and I believe that my finished project shows that. This project was incredibly difficult, but I still found it to be very fun to create as well.
In conclusion, I feel that I grew a lot as a learner from September to June, and I hope that I’ll improve even more in this coming school year as well.