Li’l Hutch

Hey guys welcome to my first weekly project blog post. This is a new thing that our class is doing now that we are in the final 3 years of high school. What I will be talking about in these posts is what we have learned and assignments we have done for the project during a week. Let’s dive right in.

So far we have only had 2 days of this project so this will be one of the shorter reflections. We have completed 3 stepping stones and 1 milestone for the building knowledge/launch phase of this project.

On Thursday we watched the first half of a docuseries about Great Canadians. The episode we watched was about Terry Fox, now I was not alive when he went on his amazing marathon of hope but to this day, each year my school does a Terry Fox Run. I have always enjoyed hearing stories or research about him. His story is not only inspiring but quite interesting. The assignment we had was to take notes on what the host says in this episode.

After watching that docuseries we had to write about what we learned that day in class and how we participated. I wrote:

1. I learned new things about Terry Fox and my Class that I didn’t know by watching a documentary about Terry fox and doing the On The Line activity with my class.

2. I contributed by being there on time, paying attention, being respectful to others and their opinion, helping my group come up with a summery of what we are learning from this new project

On Friday we did the first milestone for this project. The need to knows. This is a common milestone at the start of projects. As a class we wrote on sticky notes what we already know about this project, what we need to know or any questions we have, and what are next steps are going to be. After that we had to individually write 3 knows, 2 questions, and 1 next step.

Know:
1. That we are learning how to back up our opinion.
2. We have to choose a Canadian from 1982-onwards
3. Our driving question is “Who Is The Greatest Canadian?”

Need to know:
1. Is the Canadian supposed to have lived during this time or born in this time?
2. Will our episode correlate to our podcast topic?

Next steps:
1. Watch the rest of the greatest Canadian docuseries

For the other half of the class we learned about how to take notes on Canadian history.

I have enjoyed this project so far and can’t wait for the next week.

Hey guys, welcome back to my blog. This project has gone by fast. In only 5 weeks we have learnt more about identity and how to create a podcast and trailer. The end goal of this podcast was to create a podcast trailer with our own music, a general ideas or concept, a call to action, and describing what our podcast will be about. Let’s dive right in.

For the launch phase of this project we kinda just jumped right in. The first week back to school was crazy. We had to complete 8 different things. I at first found it a bit much since we haven’t been in class or doing this much work so fast for 6 months. But these launch assignments were like the base of our project, the foundation. On Monday we learned a key skill to have, great note taking is fundamental for high school, post secondary and life afterwards. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday we worked on learning what is a podcast and effective storytelling techniques, both are needed to start a good podcast. Then we had two assignments, First one was called alien message prompt we had to come up with a message that we would send out to aliens. The second assignment was that we had to answer some questions on a short story about a persons name and then write one ourselves.

The next step for this project was building knowledge. We got two weeks to work on this section of the project, in the first week we learned about what makes a great podcast, what is identity and had a couple small assignments throughout the week. The small assignment were writing a letter to ourselves in the future, reading a excerpt from farewell to Manzanar and answering questions about it, reading “The Bear That Wasn’t”, and defining what a is community. In the second week we worked on identity, what people know about us at first glance and when they first meet us and things people don’t know at first until they get to know you.

The next two sections of this project are develop and critique and present and reflect. Develop and critique was mainly the part of the project where we create our trailer, our music and our idea and we get feedback from either peers or our teacher. I got a lot of great feedback from the peer critique for my podcast idea from Meg. For the feedback on our draft one of our podcast trailer Owen, Noah and Matthew gave me some great feedback. For the present and reflect part of the project we created our final draft for our podcast and wrote a summative blog posts which is the blog post you were currently reading.

During this project we created a post about identity, which you can find here.

You can listen to my podcast here.

What is my understanding of identity.

Identity can be described different ways but the way I understand it is that identity is the way people describe themselves or categorize themselves. People identify themselves differently. For example categories, heritage, friends and family, locations, and etc.

How I identify myself.

I identify myself with categories, heritage and location. The way I categorize myself is by the activities I do or what I’m interested in. I define myself as a dancer, a Frisbee player, creative, Harry Potter fan, Disney fan. I can also identify myself with my heritage, where I’m from and where my family is from, my roots. I am a Canadian because I both live here and was born here, I’m also Irish, Scottish, and Ukrainien. Those are the main ones I know of. Many people define others by where they or there family are from and sometimes it is defined in a rude way. I mostly identify myself with my location, if I grew up somewhere else it may have effected me differently. By living in a community and in a place where nature shines and isn’t overpowered to much by buildings and new developments I am different than someone who grows up in a busy city with less nature and doesn’t spend time outdoors a lot. I find that living in a place where there is so much nature has helped me identify myself and to feel more free to be who I want to be. A way that helps me have deep thoughts is to go for a nice walk in the woods or if I’m at my cabin I could go for a paddle or a swim. I find location really helps us discover who we are and impacts who we are.

so far during this project we have done many different assignments were we learn through the thought of identity. Here are some examples:

My name writing exercise:

For this project we explored identity in the form of our names, while writing this assignment I learned many new things about how my name is connected to my family and my Scottish heritage. I discovered new branches of my large extended family tree and learned names I never knew.

The second assignment I have learned more about identity from was our bio-poem. During this assignment I had to really think about me and what I think of as my identity and how I feel about certain things differently than others.

Past, future, present. These are great things to think and reflect on if learning about identity. The third assignment that I think represents where I learned and reflected on most for learning about identity. We wrote a letter to ourselfs in the future, I was happy to do this because I have always wanted to write a letter to my future self but I have never had the time. I think that writing this in september was perfect timing because I had so many questions about all the chaos going on right now.

I have really enjoyed learning about identity and my identity and hope to learn more throughout this year.

Hi and welcome to my TPOL presentation. Before I started to work on my T-Pols I decided to look back at my goal moving forward from my M-Pols, “Reflect back to the competencies that are required in a project, apply them to my work and represent them in my own words on my learning portfolio.” I said I was going to achieve this by “focusing on how to apply the competencies to the work before I start on an assignment or project and while doing that put them in my own words to better understand them” I have found that I haven’t quite succeeded on my goal but I’m quite close to getting into that habit, I hope that I can keep improving on this goal.

In my past Tpol I explained that I was having some trouble with writing my thoughts down and expanding on them, I have found that I have improved quite a bit with the help of writing more blog posts and writing for assignments. I feel that the best way to improve is to write more and more to get into the habit of writing. I find that saying what i want to write as I write it allows me to hear what it is to make sure it not only makes sense but is what I have in my head. I think that I have not fully succeeded at writing but am close to getting in a good writing pattern.

I have really enjoyed this year because I got to learn more about subjects I have always wanted to know more about, I have always known briefly about WW2 but never really knew about WW1. I was excited to start on our Great War project and enjoyed every bit of it, I got to learn about my great great grandfather and his role in WW1 as well as the role of animals. Another subject I have wanted to learn more about is reproduction due to my mom being a labor and delivery nurse, my mom has explained a couple things about it though I have always wanted to expand my knowledge on the topic.

I feel that I am ready to move on to grade 10 because I have learned many new skills, gained good habits and lost bad ones, and have completed a couple of goals. I’m ready to apply these skills, habits and create new goals for next year, I’m also overall excited to hopefully go back to school September and hope to be able to return to a busy and strict schedule.

Thank you so much for listening and I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Hey guys and welcome back to my blog today I will be talking about my most recent scimatics project. I really enjoyed this project since it focused about reproduction and I already know lots since my mom is a labor and delivery nurse. The final outloook for this project was to create a model to represent the phases of mitosis and meiosis.

Our first milestone for this project was to create a project start mindmap and to include questions, thoughts and examples. I decided to add questions about the project and a few details on what I already know of this topic.

For our second milestone we were assigned a khan academy unit to complete. The unit had multiple explanatory videos on what mitosis and meiosis are and many more details about them, there were also little quizzes after 2 or 3 videos, and at the end there is a unit test and one you Finnish the test you screen shot the page and hand it in.

The next milestone was quite fun and brought out the creativity in me. For this milestone we had to learn how to use this program called Tinkercad which is kinda like a model or design software (kind of like sketchup) I love using these programs for designing and creating models. Our models had to represent the different phases of meiosis and mitosis.

Our final milestone was to create a narrated video explaining the phases of meiosis and mitosis and the similarities and differences between the two.

phases of meiosis:
In many ways, meiosis is a lot like mitosis. … Since cell division occurs twice during meiosis, one starting cell can produce four gametes (eggs or sperm). In each round of division, cells go through four stages: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase.

phases of mitosis:
Mitosis consists of four basic phases: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase. … These phases occur in strict sequential order, and cytokinesis – the process of dividing the cell contents to make two new cells – starts in anaphase or telophase. Stages of mitosis: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase.

similarities and differences:
Mitosis produces two cells from one parent using one division event. But meiosis produces four new child cells with two divisions, each of which has half the genetic material of its parent. Mitosis takes place all over the body, while meiosis only takes place in the sex organs and produces sex cells.

I really enjoyed this project and I hope that we get to learn more around this topic. I have really enjoyed this year of scimatics and I am looking forwards to next year.

How can exploring stories and text help us understand the impact of Canada’s identity?
This is the question me and my class have recently been trying to answer.

Hi there and welcome back to another one of my blog posts, todays blog post is about our most recent humanities project on WW1 or the Great War. Our final product for this project was for us to research a Canadian soldier and a topic about the Great War, once we created 4-5 pages of research we were to send them to our teacher for her to create a PLP 9 WW1 book with everyone’s soldier and topic research.

Our first milestone for this project was ‘the domino effect’,

our task for this milestone was to create a piece of media (video, sketch, comic, explain everything, stop motion, puppet show, political cartoon, mindmap, book creator, podcast) to explain what this visual represents of the domino effect of how WW1 begun. I decided to do a sketch to represent that this war begun due to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. I also added aa bit of writing to represent my thoughts behind it. ‘The black hand from Russia assassinated Duke Ferdinand of Austria, Austria is allied with Hungary and Germany, Russia is allied with France, the UK and Canada, therefore Austria, Hungary and Germany are at war with Canada, UK, France and Russia’.

Milestone 2 was the starting of our soldier research, for this milestone we put or research in a different format than the the one for the book. The soldier I chose is Roy Phillip Hutchison (my great great grandfather) the outline for what we needed to include int his page was:

• Name of Soldier
• Life Span (in years)
• Role in the War
• Potential IMAGE – (really try to find one with any image or newspaper clipping)
• Where is your soldier from?
• Why did they go to war?
• How old were they when they went?
• Did they survive? If not – how did they die in War?
• Any battles that he was present at?
• Family relations and ties? Wife, brothers, sisters?
• ANY interesting facts or stories you can find about your soldier.

Our third milestone was to start out research for our topic pages. The topics we could choose from were:
The Assassination of ArchDuke
Canada Enters the War
The Triple Entente
The Triple Alliance
The War at Sea
The War in the Air
Technology of Artillery
Tools used in the Trenches
Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF)
Role of Animals in the war
WWI Tanks
The 2nd Battle of Ypres
Flanders Fields
Vimy Ridge
Battle of the Somme
Eastern Front and Russian Revolution
Conscription
Propaganda in WWI
Film Industry and the War
The Schlieffen Plan
Passchendaele
The Halifax Disaster
Minorities in the War
Shell Shock
Life on the Homefront
Chemical Warfare
Changing Role of Women
Nurses in the War
Canada’s Hundred Days
Discontent in Germany
Changing Borders of Europe WWI
Treaty of Versailles
The Unknown Soldiers

I decided that I wanted to choose the role of animals in the war, the reason as to why this was my first choice is because I love animals and was curious if there were less obvious animals with roles in WW1. I found many roles for animals on many website and narrowed my focus on two animals that aren’t as obvious of a choice, the animals I chose were dogs and birds. Dogs would used to carry first aid packs and find wounded soldier so that the soldier could help themselves, dog would also find dying soldiers and stay with them till they pass so they aren’t alone. Birds on the other hand would send messages, they would put the bird’s nest where they wanted to send and receive the messages because birds always fly home.

The next milestone we were assigned to read 1 of 3 books, the options we were given were War Horse, Private Peaceful, Generals Die In Bed. We were to say our top three or surprise me, our teacher than assigned us each a book and a book group. I decided to say surprise me and was given War horse, I was quite happy since my topic was the role of animals in WW1. The other people in my class who got assigned this book were Anders, Julia, Jude, Alex, Matthew, Emily and Liam. For 4 Thursdays we zoomed and discussed the chapters we read for that week and shared a certain form of media we completed for that week.

For our second last milestone we had to create our final drafts of our topic and soldier pages and hand them so our teacher could put them all together and create our class book. We had to send in an ePub and a PDF so if she needed to give feedback she could do it on the PDF, if we got feedback we would have to make those changes then send in in as an ePub for our final pages.

here is our book

Our last milestone is what your are reading now, usually our final milestone are to create a blog post about our projects.

Our competencies for this project were

Comprehend: What literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding?

Take Historical Perspective: How can we overcome our current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand those of people in the past?

The milestones that I think best represented the Comprehend competency were probably 1and 4, for these milestone I used my knowledge of media and stories to comprehend and understand the meaning behind not just my media and stories but other’s media and stories.

For the take historical perspective competency the milestones I think best represent this competency are 2,3, 4 and 5. These milestones helped me understand the stories of other people and animals and how WW1 effected them.

This was a great project and I have always wanted to learn more about WW1.