Happy New Year everyone and welcome back to another blog post! I haven’t posted since the last SBC challenge and I am so excited to be back! Todays post is about the 2018 PLP Winter Exhibition and I will be reflecting on the journey our group went through and how we ended up with something presentable at the exhibition.

When we first received this project and were told about the exhibition, I felt very scared. It seemed like a lot at first and I didn’t know how we were going to prepare and how we were going to presen. I knew that I had my group members with me and we would get through it together. Our teacher randomly assigned us in groups of 4 or 5, with whom we worked together with on previous projects. We were now all familiar enough with each other to begin this big project for the Winter Exhibition. The main goal for the final product of this project was to answer the driving question: “How is Religious Worldview represented in the real world.” Each group was, again, randomly assigned a religion and we had to create a poster, activity, and snacks that both represented the religion but also answered the driving question.

Our group received Islam. We dug deeper into the depths of the faith  and discovered many things that made Islam different from other faiths or religions. We started with our first poster draft and for our group things did not go well. We decided to make a 3-D model to make our poster stand out, but we quickly discarded that idea 2 classes down the road. It was a bit too complicated for this situation and very hard to  make. Our group continued to brainstorm while others went ahead, and at one point it felt like we were left behind. Us 5, went up to the teacher with our ideas but constantly were sent back to revise because there were either to many words or the design wasn’t nice etc. Our drafts looked like this:

The last one is our final poster, which we presented at the Winter Exhibition. I feel that if we would had more time to talk and not get distracted, we would have had an easier time coming up with a concept for our poster. It constantly felt as thought we were always taking 2 steps forward and then 1 back. Eventually we arrived at the concept that was presentable and made that into a poster.

Our second task was to engage the audience by creating an activity that relates to our religion. We had come up with 2 ideas for our activity, to write your name in Arabic or a board game that we would create. Our group ended up choosing writing your name in Arabic and frankly I think it was a really good choice because it was easy but when the people came by, they got really excited when they heard they would be writing in Arabic! We also made name tags for our whole group where we wrote our names in English and on the bottom in Arabic!

I loved watching people figure out and have fun with our activity because I felt proud knowing that this was an original idea and that we brainstormed all of this! Our last part was to make a snack for our audience that were somehow related to Islam. Most Muslims tend to live in the Middle East area, which contains a very hot climate and only allows limited food to grow in those areas. The only food that can survive such extreme weather are… dates! To elevate the snack we decided to make date squares, which consist of a date paste with granola crumble on top! I could tell people were hesitant at first because not many people eat dates on a daily bases in Canada, but one they tried it, they loved it!

I want to reflect on 2 things in this post, my work with the group and the way we presented our project. My group was amazing to work with although I might say some of us (including me)  get distracted very easily and I think I need to work on that. I need to understand that managing my time is very important and to block out time vampires. The way we presented ended up okay but I wish our group had made a script or something along those lines so that we weren’t stuttering when we were presenting.

Here are some pictures from the night of the exhibition:

Overall I think I made a good contribution to my group and that I am happy about the way everything went because if it didn’t I wouldn’t be where I am today. If you would like to go check out my group memebers blog, you can check out Ryan, Ally, Grace, Finn!

Thank you so much for reading this post and see you in the next one!

~Malaika💛