The past 5 weeks we have been learning about the Middle Ages in our humanities class, throughout the project we have gained a lot of knowledge about the Middle Ages that all tied into our driving question, What was life like in the Middle Ages? How does it compare to today. The main thing that we focused on about this driving question was the “How does it compare to today” part of it because a big thing about this was identifying continuity and change. Going through this project we took notes throughout everything we learned about in Keynote. One of the main parts of our project was the Book of The Lion by Michael Cadnum.

The two Main competencies that we focused on was the Comprehend competency for the English part of humanities and The Continuity and Change competency for the social studies part. For the Continuity and Change competency I met this by showing my understanding of continuity in spice trade and change in the trebuchet. For the Comprehend part I met this by using my keynote notes, watching and listening to important videos and reading articles on the Middle Ages.

The first Milestone in this project we started our literacy plan for the book of the lion. We had seven questions for ourselves the first one was “Do you consider yourself quick reader or slow close reader?” My answer to that was that I am a very slow reader. The second questions was “What types of books have you enjoyed reading in the past?” My answer to this question was Graphic novels because they help me understand what is happening in the book. The third question was “What time of day will you read your book?”, my answer to this was I will read 2 or more chapters during the week at about 5:00 on Monday to Tuesday, 7:00 on Wednesday, and the rest of the week will be at 5:00. The weekends I will read anywhere from 4:00-8:00. The fourth question was “How long will you read for?”, my answer to this was I will read for 45 minutes every day over the span of 3 weeks. The fifth question was “How will you remind yourself to read?”, the answer to this was to put the chapters that I need to read in Things. The  sixth question was “What three techniques will you use to comprehend what you are reading. The last question was “Who is your accountability partner?”, the answer to that was my mom. A competency that was being assessed was comprehend which stated what literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding.

The second Milestone was our character letter we were assigned a simulated role and I got the part of being a serf. We were next taken into part two of this milestone which was to Brainstorm your identity. We learned all about the feudal system used in the Middle Ages and since I was a serf I had to find out how a serf lived and whatever else came with it. The third part was a page letter of what our character communicates to another made up person. My letter was about my serf talking to my cousin about my day and how my life is as a serf. The last part was to compare and contrast. We had to find out what the biggest differences were between me and my character, and what the similarities were. The biggest things that I thought of were that we have way more freedom now in relation to the Middle Ages, I similarity I found was that we both have leaders.

The third Milestone was the book chats for The Book of The Lion. We had three roles throughout three weeks in this, the summarizer being the one to summarize the chapters we read, the connector making connections to real life and the book and the artist creating a piece of artwork to do with what happened in the book. In our groups we chatted about how the reading was going and what we noticed that may have stood out to us.

The fourth milestone was research about an example of continuity and change that we would have to create a presentation for. My parter in this project was Evelyn and our two main topics for this part of the project were spice trade as an example of continuity and the trebuchet as an example of change. We were to point out the key differences for change and and key points about what has stayed the same. This also tied onto the driving question. We created our presentation on Keynote and practiced how to project our voice and speak clearly in front of an audience. I think that the presentation went very well and the whole project in general and I feel that after learning this the renaissance is very fitting to learn next.

Middle Ages Presentation
https://youtu.be/36T9DvFFhEM

Hello it’s Raymond welcoming you back from winter break, this last PLP winter exhibition we worked on a blue sky project and a project called mazer tag were you can find here. For our blue sky project (do anything you want)  the driving question was “How might I design and build an answer to my own inquiry”. This brought me to my own how might we question which was “how might we create something to express different emotions using Star Wars music”. This is what kickstarted my project and had me going on a good path. This was what the first milestone was about.

What we used throughout this project was the LAUNCH cycle. Starting with the “L” phase Look, Listen and Learn, Saw the first Star Wars movie and heard music that was used in my final project. This phase included lots of research and figuring out how I could use this in my project. I learned lots of things from classmates and teachers wether is was important parts of the movies to understand more design opportunities  or even just encouragement with your ideas for a final project. The competency that was assessed was the Look, Listen and learn competency.

The next phase was the “A” phase ask tons of questions. In this phase I created a chart of questions ranging from robot questions, detective questions, judge questions and inventor questions, these questions could be answered by a simple google search or YouTube video, or it could be more complicated and required a different approach to answer the questions. This phase helped me refine my task and make it much easier to handle. The competency assessed was Ask the Hard Questions, doing this makes you have a strong understanding of what you need to know to create your product.

The “U” phase which was understanding the problem or process was where we had to use finer search terms while researching to find the exact bit of information we needed. Some of these questions needed some different or imaginative solutions. This is where the innovative designer competency came in, this included using a variety of technologies to create imaginative solutions to solve difficult problems. The other competency assessed was Understanding the problem or process. This included stating the source of information which could be in MLA format like we used in our third milestone. This competency also had choosing an idea to pursue but still keeping other ideas open.

The next phase was the “N” phase Navigate Ideas, this phase we made a video to show our innovative designer competency. The video included what our steps were to create our end product and what we have done so far towards our goal. The “N” phase included thinking inside the box but making the most as possible with the constraints we had. I use iMovie to make the video that showed these competencies. 

The second last phase was the “C” phase Create a Prototype, this phase i created a prototype of a Star Wars music remix the competency assessed was Create, Make, Design and Build and Computational thinker. This is were I used the power of technology and created music on my iPad. My plan at this point in the cycle for my final product I would use GarageBand and iMovie put together to make a video with visuals and audio.

The last phase was “H” highlight and fix, this is where you finish up your project and just tweak your product for the actual presentation or. This is where I also showed my teachers fail evidence. Without this failing I would probably not have done as well because when you learn from your mistakes you focus on it more and you make yourself complete that task with greater detail. I also identified the sources of feedback and made changes even self critique like if there was a little thing wrong with my product I would fix it. As for being a computational thinker I used apps on my iPad to show the power of technology and ultimately develop a solution to my inquiry. At this point it was time to LAUNCH our project to the world.

The area we presented our projects in was the planet Endor… not actually on the Star Wars planet though. Myself and a group of grade 8’s and 9’s made a replica of Endor in one of our classrooms. This place was decorated with lots of green paper had many cardboard trees and even had a pine scent. The room was somewhat dark like you are being covered in trees and we had some ambient noise included in our area. Other groups were assigned different places like Tatooine, Hoth and The Death Star. Overall this project was quite fun especially finishing it off with taking almost the whole movie theatre to ourselves and getting to watch Star Wars Rise of Skywalker.

This is another recap of a project called the medium is the message. This project was all about advertising. Our driving question was “how does what we read hear and see influence us”. This was the first big project for Humanities and we were all just getting into high school so most of our class was clueless and this brings us to our first Milestone.

Milestone one, this was the first milestone and to be honest I really did not know what to do. We watched an advertisement called “welcome home”. We then had to dissect this and show our understanding of the target audience and what message they used to reach their target audience. This was a fail (first attempt in learning), we say this because we just got into a new project and we were just getting to know the basics.

Milestone two, this milestone was surveying people that are not in your demographic. I chose to survey my mom. Like I thought we did not have the same perspective. We had different tastes in clothing and different perspectives in advertising. I learned that demographics can have impacts of what we think about advertising. I feel that most people have the same perspectives in advertising but different things could make the perspectives more broad.

Milestone three, this task was to make a chart and simply watch television. We were to record ads into this chart and show how they used either pathos which is a advertising strategy that uses emotional appeal, logos which uses logic, reason, statistics and facts and ethos which is when the advertiser makes you trust them. We also recorded some other strategies that the advertisers use. I saw that most of the time our classes advertisements we related to their particular channel. My channel was a sports channel so I got a lot of sponsors for the sports team advertising.

Milestone four, this milestone we wrote up an analysis for a book we read called “The Highest Tide”. We had to connect this to advertising like identifying literary techniques like pathos, logos and ethos. Another thing we had to find is some techniques that are different from pathos, logos and ethos.

Milestone five/six, these milestones were completed in Oregon. We made an ad for our local area business a couple weeks before this and this was for a business in Oregon. These milestones showed our shared understanding. We made many, many drafts and critiqued each other. We said things like you could add or have you tried doing this. Eventually we wrapped these up and that was the end of our first Humanities project of grade 8.

This was my first draft of my local business advertisement compared to the last.

This was my first draft of the Oregon advertisement compared to my final draft.

This post today is about a unit maker that we just finished in school. You may be thinking, what is maker?. Maker is a subject exclusive to our program called PLP. It consists of designing being a good digital citizen and of course making things. I would like to show you what we have made in our project called “The Power of A Pencil”. This project was about using our apple pencils.

The first milestone in this project was name art. This was pretty cool and I enjoyed it a lot. I started off with my name in big block letters and then I added some two point perspective and I filled the letters in with the fill tool in sketches pro. It was still a bit blank so I changed the colour of the background and added some texture.

Milestone two was about taking sketch notes. We watched a video called “The Power of Belief” and we took sketch note on it. The big things about this was the lettering, connectors and symbols.

The third milestone was making a self portrait of ourselves. We utilized the layers feature in sketches pro. I tried my best with the shading. This does not really look like me, it’s a little bit scary but it helped me learn more about shading.

The fourth milestone was drawing a fruit bowl. Like the self portrait we used layers to trace the real life version. In this project we used lots of colour this time and the blending of colours with shading.

In the fifth milestone we had to make a logo. This logo represents me because I like baseball. For this we used an apple app called “Keynote”. This was about using symbols, shapes, colours and text to represent your company.

The most important thing about this project was the competency being assessed and that was about being an empowered learner. I have felt empowered by the apps that I have been using. I am lucky that I get to use these because they are so powerful. In my name art for example, it would have taken so much longer to make that if I did it on a piece of paper. It is just so easy to switch tools and create layers so this also made me like drawing more. I have learned that you are not limited of capabilities when you are on a iPad. This unit was super fun and I would like to take the things I learned and put that into what I do normally.

Today I will be talking about the incredible past field trip I went on to Oregon. As you may know I live in Vancouver and Oregon is a decent length from home. We were to set off on October 19th and come back on October 25th. The furthest south we went was Newport Oregon, before we went here we took a stop at Astoria for a night. Overall I though this trip was very exciting and would definitely go back to Oregon if I had the chance. 

For this trip we had three driving questions, the first was how did you manage your impulsivity. The second was how did you persist and the third and final was how did you work interdependently.

For managing your impulsivity I think that this happened on the bus. At some points on the ride it got really loud, so loud that I just wanted to yell “shut-up!”. I managed my impulsivity and did not shout out, I just put my headphones on and pumped up the music. The second question was about persisting, when this really showed the most I think was when we were at Fort Stevens. Don’t get me wrong, this place was really cool and I got a good bit out of it but my legs were just aching, I was hungry and my feet were uncomfortable from wearing boots. The third question was about working interdependently, this happened in two groups of people. One was for an Oregon business interview and the other was a group for quests. The interview group was with Julien, Erin and Quinn. I think that this group was very good because we have been in that group since the start of the school year. In this group at our interview we worked very well, everyone had a job and we executed it well. For our quest group I think that we got better each quest we did. I think the reason that we got better is because everyone got a task and when everyone stuck to that task we did well.

Day one started off with an early wake and early departure as we left school on a Saturday at 6:15 in the morning. We set off all half asleep but excited for the journey ahead. Our first stop was the USA and Canada border. This took longer than expected and actually made us miss a stop in Washington. We drove for a few hours and stopped at the Columbia river and the Astoria-Megler Bridge. This bridge is the longest truss bridge in North America and goes from Washington to Oregon. We made it to Astoria and checked out the Astoria column and went inside. At the end of that day we went to have pizza on the beach and that was the day. We slept at Fort Stevens State Park in yurts and that was day one. As this was our first day we had to learn to work together with the five people in our yurt. I think that we all had to manage our impulsivity because there were people in the state park that might have actually wanted to sleep so we had to keep the noise level down. I think that this day was the loudest out of any of the yurts but I think we were still relatively quiet.

Day two started off with breakfast of course and then we went to the mouth of the Columbia river (the south jetty to be exact) and we took some photos. Next we headed to Fort Stevens historic area and we got a tour of the fort and this was a pretty cool opportunity. After taking the tour we headed to what I think the highlight of the trip was and that was Highlife Adventures Zip-lines. This place was awesome and like nothing I have been to before. This place had a Zip-line spanning 1000 feet and some through the trees and one even into a lake. We were all pretty worn out after this and so we ended the day off with some Thai food at Nisa’s Thai Kitchen. This food was amazing and also it was cool when Nisa come out with flaming beef, yes beef that is literally on fire. We spent our last night in Astoria at the same state park. This day for managing your impulsivity was better, we learned to work together and kept the yurt at a low noise level. 

Day three was jam packed, it started off with a stop at the Columbia river maritime museum and this place was really cool. We got to try on suits that the Coast Guard uses to keep warm while swimming in the freezing cold water. Next up was a long drive to canon beach. When we arrived it was super windy and rainy. We decided to still go even though it was terrible weather. When we got on the beach it was even more windy, so windy in fact the wind held me up when I fell back into it. I thought that was pretty fun but I don’t know about others. Next was a drive from Canon Beach to Tillamook. We made it to Tillamook and we went to the Tillamook creamery. This is the main Tillamook cheese factory and you could see the steps in making cheese and people actually working through glass. We then drove from Tillamook to Newport and stayed at South Beach State Park in yurts again. This day for me was a lot of persistence, the bus was loud and I could feel the sound but I just tried to let it go and focus on something else.

Day four we did some looking around at the state park and the beach. For lunch this day we had really good fish and chips. These were one of the best fish and chips I have ever had if not the best. Our afternoon was taken up by a visit to the Hatfield Marine Science Center. We had three classes, Animal Adaptations, Speedy Science and Assemble A Whale. These were all very fun but my favourite was the Speedy Science because you got to race crabs and what’s more fun than racing crabs. This day ended at the same state park as before. This day had lots of working interdependently, I think that I could have been more into the working and gave in some more ideas.

Day five was another visit to the Hatfield Marine Science Center and this was awesome. We made R.O.V machines (remotely operated vehicles) and and drove them around in some water tanks. After this we checked out the visitors centre and this place had some cool stuff like a tsunami machine, an octopus and a pool with sea stars, sea anemones and sea urchins. Our next stop was the Yaquina Head. This place was unbelievable, the views were breathtaking. Words couldn’t describe how amazing this place was. There was a cobble beach and it was super natural, there were seals and urchins and we even saw a dead bird. This place was probably my favourite destination. We headed to a place called Beverly Beach so see the sunset and wrap up an incredible day. This day I think my working interdependently got better, our group didn’t argue and we finished a our R.O.V before everyone else.

Day six was a lot of driving, we stopped at Depoe Bay where the worlds smallest harbour is and we went to some shops to check them out. What I noticed about this place is that the community has quite a strong bond. There were lots of nice people and that’s what really stood out to me. After taking a stop here we drove up to Washington where our next stop would be John’s Incredible Pizza Company. I don’t know who John is but I sure know that he has an incredible pizza company. This place was a buffet but it had and arcade and even rides inside. Next we had another long drive to Ike Kinswa State Park this time we stayed in cabins and they had lots more room than yurts. This day was more of a just chill day so I didn’t have any situations that were part of the driving questions.

Our on our last day we went to northwest trek and this place had some cool animals like bisons, moose, elk and deer. This place is not like a zoo though, they have animals in here that can just roam free in the forest and that is why this place is so amazing. We were on the final stretch and had about a four hour drive but it didn’t feel that long to me, probably because we had so many long drives that I just got used to it. We made it back home all in one piece and we were all exhausted after that amazing journey.