Just kidding, November first was Take your kid to work day, an event for grade 9s meant to show them what some jobs are like, as well as to teach them what their parents do everyday. I got to go to work with my Dad, who is a firefighter for the City of North Vancouver! But what was really cool is that all the kids who had parents working for the city got to go on a tour! It started at the town hall.then after we went to the police station, we got to see the all of the cells and how they were cleaned, the garage and where stolen vehicles go, followed by the briefing room where we got to see all the different types of jobs there are in law enforcement, such as a pilot, a bomb specialist, a media specialist, and much, much more! Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to film anywhere other than the lobby.

After the Police station we got to see the library. Sure, it might not be as interesting or cool as the police or firehall, but there are people out there who love doing what they do for their community at the library! And we shouldn’t discourage them from that. While we were there we got to see behind the curtain and see the innermost workings of the library. I got to see how books are sorted after someone drops them off, how different libraries are all linked, and how different jobs at the library work!

After lunch I finally got to go to the firehall, this is where I got to learn about different types of fire, A fire(woods and normal combustibles), B fire, (combustible liquids and chemicals) and C fire (electrical) as well as the different types of fire extinguishers to use on them. I had to make a video on how my day went, I am pretty pleased with it, but hey, how about you see it for yourself!

Magical YouTube link. They also had a demonstration on fire safety, where they would talk about flash over and back draft. As well as an example of how smoke is unburnt fuel for the fire, which is why wherever smoke goes fire will follow. This means that you should always keep your door shut at night and if you are trapped in a building with fire blocking your exit, close all doors and any windows or places smoke might get through. My absolute favourite part of the whole day was operating the ladder truck, I got to go 110 feet in the air! It was pretty wobbly though.

My take your kid to work day was a great learning experience and I truly think that I learned quite a bit, it was really fun, and I couldn’t have asked for a better person to do it with.

As I got onto the school bus I had no idea that I would soon be amongst sky blue lakes, giant majestic mountains, and crisp fresh air. I went to Alberta with 23 other PLP learners, we went there to learn about geography and how it can impact us. We first stopped at Chraigellachie, where the last spike is. The last spike is the place where the Canadian Pacific railroad was finished, it is a historic place because it is where two sides of Canada were connected by a railroad. Our next stop was at Three Valley Gap, where we went into a ghost town and learned about the history of the surrounding area, we also stayed in a hotel right beside the ghost town. On the second day in we got to go on a few much smaller hikes that really introduced us to the breathtaking views of Alberta. Later in the day we got to learn about rogers pass and how the engineers of the CPR had a difficult time with getting through the mountains. The next day we woke up bright and early to go on the longest hike I have ever been on, I really liked it, just walking through the mountains for hours on end, where everything is so peaceful and quiet (aside from the 24 kids being loud as they made their way up).

The next day held one of the coolest experiences I have had. We got to go onto a glacier and learn about how it was formed and how much it has decreased because of climate change. I even got to do an interview for my maker project! (See Story finding in the Rockies!) during this trip we got a book to write in about all the places we have been to, as well as answer the driving question. How has the geography of the west shaped who I am?.

Over the next few days we got to go on a few more hikes and learning places. One of the coolest days was when we went to the Cave and Basin, the birthplace of Canadian national parks.

After we looked at the cave, we went up the mountain beside it, called sulphuric mountain because of the high concentration of sulphur. The hike was beautiful, during it we got to learn about how scientists had a laboratory at the top of the mountain and it served as a cosmic ray station and helped contribute to international geophysical year.

Overall I think that the geography of the west shaped who we are by teaching us how to learn, adapt and grow to new environments that pose challenges not come across before, this can be proven by the lab at the top of sulphur mountain teaching us that no matter where you are there is always something new to be learned, by the last spike showing that humans can accomplish and conquer an entire country if they put their minds to it. There are more examples I could put but what’s the fun in that? You should go and try to find examples of your own! This trip was amazing and the teachers have been really supportive of us all, thank you!

Hi there! My grade 8 class got to go on a special field study all the way to Oregon! It was so amazing and there we many different cool things there! The main reason we went to Oregon was to learn more about advertising and to put our knew found knowledge into use by making an ad for a small, local business. We each got put into groups of around 6 people. The business that I got assigned to was a local Chinese restaurant a little out of the way. It was still a really cool place with a quaint ambiance and a cozy atmosphere, plus the food there was delicious! We also had to write in a journal throughout the trip so here is a link to mine!

Aside from the advertising aspect of things, we also got to learn a lot about the geography, such as yaquina head, or about all of the sea biology which is a subject that I quite enjoy. We got to look at tide pools and dig up shrimp to look at them! Overall this trip was just an all round really cool experience that I am very glad I went on. I’ll catch you next time on my amazing blog!

Hi there! Welcome back to my blog. In this project we learned all about advertising and how it is used to influence us. This was a really cool project for me because I already knew quite a bit about advertising, so it was interesting to really dive into what it actually does and how it can be used to influence the public to doing what the company advertising wants. This was a really cool learning experience and we even got to make ads for a business in Oregon. We went to Oregon for our field study and we got to learn about the tide pools, but the main thing was advertisement. The business that I was assigned to was a small Chinese restaurant called “Kam Meng”, the food there was amazing and we got to learn all about the backstory of this amazing place. I am also going to put in all of the drafts I did all the way up till the final version.

Finally, my final draft.

Hi there, here we are again! After my first mPOL I started to get into more of a flow, and also understand even more what PLP is actually about. To get started. What has happened since the mPOL? We have done many new projects, such as mind over matter, or the medium is the message. You know what would be really cool? To see how much I have changed since the start of the year. So lets pull up a project from the very start of the year, and compare it to one I made recently!

This was my user guide, a project we did at the start of the year in maker. As you can see I was still new to the iPad, and I did not know how to write as well as I do now. Although I did have a lot of fun making it! It also shows how I thought at the start of the year, about PLP and school because you can tell I was much more focused on the part where I was not in “school mode”. Let’s check out something I did more recently! 

This was keystone 2 for a project called “consequences of colonization”, where I got to learn all about the colonists and what happened when they arrived. But in this paragraph you can see I was much more detail focused and On point with the knowledge I was required to present. Moving on to how I can still grow, one thing I still need to work on would  be my time management skills. The reason I think this is because even now I still leave things to the last minute which can lead to me being stressed and unhappy and then the work quality is much, much lower than it could be.

This was my learning plan and you can see that for this tPOL I did not include my learning plan for maker because I did not have it in the second semester. The trip to Oregon  was super cool and it was an amazing experience overall, even though I was in trip 2 AND on the late bus that went up. Unfortunately I missed zip lining and I was looking forward to that. The other things we did were really cool though, one of my favourite things was yaquina head part because we got to see tons of sea life and learn about the lighthouse that is there. Another thing that we did was going to go see haystack rock which is really cool and we got to see in the tide pools and watch the birds that land on the rock. I even got a photo of me beside it!

Spring exhibition.

This was the spring exhibition and in my opinion it was way better than the winter exhibition. It was organized better, it had a bigger turnout, the teachers were less stressed, so that meant everyone was happier.

thank you for checking out this blog, I hope you learned something reading this and I will see you on the next post!

Hey there welcome back to my blog, or welcome to my blog. In this science project we learned about atoms, mass, and the different states of matter, and how these all affect us. One of my personal favourite parts was learning about how to measure the mass of an object using a triple beam balance, which led to keystone 1. For keystone 2 we got to put gummy bears into different solutions, that we thought would affect gummy bears the most and view the results the next day. We did this in partners, my partner and I decided to use normal water and fizzy water, interestingly enough they came out bigger, which you will see if you decide to try this out for yourself! The third and final keystone we did was designing and making a video game, I will show you a few pictures from mine.

Overall this project taught me a lot about matter and atoms, I also had some fun experiences doing it!

In this science project, called small but mighty, we learned all about microorganisms and how they affect our body in both good ways and bad ways as well as all of the purposes of them. We learned about the adaptive immune system, the innate immune system, and each cell. Such as the macrophage, which is the cell that is tasked with getting rid of the pathogens, or the white blood cell that has the job of finding and marking any pathogens entering the body, and also the T-cell that splits up into three different variants of itself with each version having a different role. For our first keystone we were tasked with swabbing different areas of the school and then putting the swab into a Petri dish with agar in it and then observe the growths and changes over the course of the week, by the end of this keystone my Petri dish was covered in different molds and microbes. For our second keystone we were assigned to make a character for each of the cells we had learned about, making them humanized characters, I decided to make each of mine superheroes that fought off the pathogens. Finally our third keystone, we each had to make a kids health poster for schools in the district and we were also told to use at least one kindergartener’s drawing of what they thought was a “nasty germ” inside of our posters. Overall this project really helped me understand more about what actually goes on in the immune system and it also taught me how to use other peoples work in my own projects

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Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

So far this year I feel like I have learned a lot about PLP and I think that I have come pretty far since the beginning of the year. I started out the year making my learning plan which would pave the way for the rest of the year, in my learning plan I believed that I would become accomplished in maker 8, and sophisticated in humanities 8. The projects that we have done so far in humanities 8 have been the outsiders, power play, and we currently finished one called Radical innovations. my favourite humanities 8 project would have to be power play because we got to learn all about the Middle Ages which I realize now would become useful in later projects. In maker 8 the projects we have done were, making interesting images, and becoming a PLP learner, unfortunately I did not succeed at both of them, throughout the year I have had a FAIL with Showbie  since I did not really understand how to use it, and I never asked for help with it which left me floundering and trying to keep up with the class. But I think that I have figured out how to use it now. Another Thing that I had trouble with was that I did not ask enough questions on problems that I was confused on which led me down a dark hole of trying to do it all myself, I now know that I should ask more questions if I ever feel confused about something in class, or coming to tutorial in the mornings to work on anything I might need help with. The winter exhibition was before I realized that I needed to put much more effort and work into things so it was a good example of what I was doing before it.

Winter exhibition

The latest humanities project I have done if proof of this and has made me realize that I can in fact get an exceeding for a grade if I try hard enough. And I plan do try and work as hard as this on every future project so that I can achieve my learning goal. At the start of this project I was not putting maximum effort in and often just did the minimum work for whatever learning we were doing. But then I realized that I can’t do this throughout school and if I was to do this I would end up doing very bad in school ad probably being put into the normal school system, and after an email home to my parents I decided to pick myself up and try my hardest to do better in this project, so I started to pay attention, I got my work done on time, and I started doing work at home before it was happening in class so that way I knew that I would be prepared for class.

 https://www.blog44.ca/aidanm/2023/01/25/54/ 

The most recent maker project was very fun all in all but I do think I could have done better. As for what could have gone better I might say that I should have tried harder at making the booklet. With the drawings I think that it was possible for me to make them better because I could not look at them and say with confidence that I tried my absolute hardest and that was the best possible work I could do, but I am still glad that I achieved my learning goal for maker. 

https://www.blog44.ca/aidanm/2023/01/15/the-winter-exhibition/

The winter exhibition was a sort of turning point for me as it was when I started to turn myself around after this project had finished so it is a way to see what I was doing before that. As you can see from the less than good quality of this work. The fact that I typed this in one day does say a lot about it. One of the problems was that I forgot what we did on the last days of school which is when our class started the draft of this blog post and over the break I forgot what we had done so afterwards when we had the day to and the next day to work on it I did not really know what to do. So after a meeting with Ms Kaidi and figuring out what to do I just thought to myself “okay lets get this over with” and so I finished it later and barely checked it over and only did the bare minimum. After this I have shown growth by achieving my learning goal and getting an exceeding in humanities which has given me a confidence boost and now I plan to try as hard as possible for future exhibitions

During this project I learned so much and one of my favourite things was using SuperimposeX to create this awesome triptych SuperimposeX let me edit in anything I needed to and it looks great, like using the mask tool to cut off part of the clock to Mae it look like it is behind me. I am glad that I learned how because this will be very useful in future projects.