The stoves on fire!!

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

In second place….. J.J.J.A.M.M! Di was quite the experience. What is di you ask? Well, its a competition which teaches kids to be more creative and problem solve. It requires out side of the box thinking. Our team as a whole was pretty cohesive. J.J.J.A.M.M was made up ofJackson,Jack,Jasper, me, Mika and Matteo. 

What did we have to do to compete in di? Oh you know, just make a gigantic pinball machine and a story about how the pinball represents a hero going on a journey. That may sound like a lot, and ya it was a lot, but our team pulled through with a sorta working 4 by 8 foot pinball machine and a pretty awesome Star Wars themed story.

We worked hard to complete all of our elements. Some people were better at building, and some at designing, so we split the work in half under those two categories. I was on the design half of the team, because let’s be honest, I would almost definitely cut my thumb off if I was handed a saw. 

Since our presentation stopped at 5 minutes when it was supposed to be 8, the judges didn’t eat our donuts, the music wasn’t loud enough, and our pinball round didn’t even count, being some of the many things that didn’t go great, we have a lot to improve on! Two main things we’ll be improving on are, bettering our machine mainly practicing utilizing it in our story and having a new team choice element to replace the donuts. 

My favourite parts of di were, how well our team worked together on our instant challenge, how our team presented, and acted very well, and our overall teamwork. Some fun moments so far were when Mika and I stayed late at school to make costumes out of cardboard, and cooking donuts with Mika and Jack, even though it was quite chaotic, there was a whole lot of smoke and maybe even a flame, and in the end someone asked us if they were chicken wings.

Di has been quite the adventure so far, and it will continue to be as we prepare for our second competition, provincials!

Our di team J.J.J.A.M.M:

May the toast be with you!

-Ailie 💜

It’s raining meatballs!

Hey guys!

With her little purple wings fluttering nervously and her fluffy paws shaking, she gently peeled back the stamp of the envelope, and folded open the piece of paper inside. Her warm brown eyes rapidly scanned the page. As they reached the bottom of the document her fluffy features fell. A small tear landed on the big red words, Admission Declined. Pamella’s dream washed away like a leaf riding the rapids of a river.

Our most recent project was cutting heads and limbs off stuffed animals. Well ok, we had reasons for that. Our PLP 9 class made the PLP famous Frankinstuffies! We decapitated and de-limbed multiple stuffed animals to create new animals! I already knew how to hand sew, but this was quite a challenge, and I learned new ways to sew to reinforce my Frankinstuffies body. I was tasked with making an awesome life story for her, with many challenges and adventures throughout it. 

The process of creating her though sewing was sooo fun!

The photo above is what Pamella looked like before.

And this is the after!

The summary of my story is, when my frankinstuffie, Pamella Gwendolyn Brog was rejected from culinary school, her life goal to make food and spread it to the world suddenly seemed impossible. So she decided to take action and not quit because of one setback! With the assignment to make this story, I improved my story writing skills, and I learned about how all stories have a theme. The theme for Pamella’s life story is, if life isn’t going your way, other doors will open and other opportunities will arrive so keep living life to the fullest and don’t give up!

After I wrote my short story I turned it into a 2min video! With the help and new information about green screens and how they work in iMovie, I created many different scenes for Pamella to live in. Keynote helped with removing backgrounds and cleaning up scenes. 

Here’s the video I made!:

Here also a link to my paddlet to give me feedback and comment on my story!:

Pamella paddlet

-Ailie 💜

Louis was Riel Historical!

Hello!

Have any of you ever heard of Louis Riel? For our most recent project we learned all about the history Louis Riel, his portrayals over the historical period of his life and how he was an important historical figure to Canada, with the driving question of “How has the Portrayal of Riel Changed Over Time?”.

To learn about Riel and to work up to having a good understanding of him, we did a bunch of research! We looked at how artists portrayed him through statues, such as “Joyal’s Louis Riel at the Manitoba Legislature”. This is a statue made in 1996 that can be seen in front of the Legislative buildings in Manitoba. Another source we used for research and understanding was the “Louis Riel Heritage Minute”. We watched this video, and then wrote a mini paragraph about how we thought it portrays Louis Riel.
The heritage minute video:

 https://youtu.be/0fLnJp-Rjow?si=luLoZhHOKzbmQf9N

We also improved our writing skills in order to write a multi paragraph response to the driving question. The first few lessons we touched up on things we already knew like synonyms and antonyms. Then we just deepened our understanding on more complex words and more professional ways to say things.

There were multiple drafts and trials to try and create a final multi paragraph response. We had help from our peers and teachers to make some edits. Along with gaining feedback and giving peer critique, we also learned how to properly improve our editing skills. With these skills we made it so that the final result of our work, and our peers work could reach its full potential.

Here are some of the most recent edits I have received:

Our class learned about the portrayals of Riel, in order to understand the important events in Canadian history. Louis Riel was part of the history of Canada, he helped found Manitoba! Being able to write is also a very valuable skill, and touching up on your writing skills is important to do from time to time. In the future if I ever have to look back on my Canadian history knowledge, then I can confidently say that Riel was a big part of Canadian history. Louis was Riel historical! 

Click here to see my multi paragraph response:

Louis Riel is portrayed in many different ways, depending on the time period, and the view one has on the history involving him. The start of the story was in 1812, when the Red River settlement was formed. During the mid 1800’s there were multiple groups arriving and settling in the Red River colony. Louis Riel was born in 1844 to a Métis father and a French Canadian mother. He was already a leader in his family, being the eldest of 11 children. He spoke the French language, as well as being a practicing Catholic. The groups directly involved with the story of Louis Riel were the English and Scottish settlers, and several different cultures, including the Métis who had already settled in the Red River. In 1868 the Hudson’s Bay Company was going to sell the colony to the British, who would then sell it to the Canadian government. However the First Nations and Métis who lived on the land were not consulted about this sale. This is where Louis Riel comes into the story.

Before the sale was finalized, the Canadian government sent surveyors to scope out the land. When they entered the Métis land however, they did not ask for permission. In 1869, Métis community leader Louis Riel and a dozen other armed Metis drove the surveyors away from a farm belonging to Riel's cousin. The Métis now controlled Red River after this action of resistance. In December of 1869 the Métis established their own provisional government. At this time Riel is seen or portrayed as a courageous leader to the Métis, a hero of sorts, who didn’t give up his land or his people. A secondary source that portrays this is the statue “Joyal’s Louis Riel at the Manitoba Legislature”. It portrays Riel as professional and strong, because his posture is straight and he is wearing professional robes. To others, specifically the Canadian government, Riel was seen as a nuisance, a rebel, someone who was a problem, or just in the way of there plans.

In 1870 one of the most beneficial members of a group called the Canadian Party, Thomas Scott was then trialed for disobedience, he was found guilty by Louis Riel and was executed. The cause of this was that the Canadian Party attempted to overthrow Louis Riel and the provisional government. The tables turned for Riel, he could now be seen as unjust, wicked and wrongful of killing a man who didn’t agree with him. There was discontent in Canada; people wanted Riel to be caught and hung. On May 12th, 1870 with the help of Louis Riel, Manitoba became a province, through negotiations between the federal and provisional government. In many Canadian history textbook and resources, Riel will be mentioned because of his influence in the Manitoba act. In these textbooks he is portrayed as a influential political figure with the nickname of “the founding father of Manitoba”.

Now Manitoba is a province, but despite that there is still conflict! Riel was getting may death threats, and they were damaging his mental heath. 1200 Canadian troops were sent to assassinate him. In fear of death he fled over the American boarder. He couldn’t live in Canada because he feared for his life. Riel was also a religious man, who faithfully believed in God. While he was in exile, he had delusions that he was a prophet sent by God to defend the Métis. In the end, he came back across the boarder, surrendered, and was executed by the Canadian government. Another statue made to portray Riel is “Lemay and Gadboury’s Abstract Louis Riel Statue”. It portrays Riel as shamed, crazy or even deformed and defeated, because his mental heath was hurting him and he was getting death threats. The sides that were with him were the Métis, French speaking, and Catholics, all of which supported him and thought of him as a hero. The other sides however, the English, Protestant and Europeans, did not support him and thought of him as rebellious and cruel.

In conclusion, Riels portrayals overtime changed with every action he took. Today Riel has schools named after him, artwork representing him, and a national day dedicated to him. His execution is now generally thought of as a wrongful action, and was apologized for by the Canadian government in 1998. Today he is still a hero for the Métis in Canada!

Thank you so much for reading!

 -Ailie 💜

Potatoes 🥔

Ireland is famous for its potatoes, it’s less famous for its revolution but….

This winter exhibition was my third exhibition ever! This time our project was called metaphor machines, with a driving question of: how do ideas drive change? For this project we were put into groups based on which revolution we wanted to study. I was put in group Ireland (aka Easter Rising) with Finn, MatteoJannik, Meghan, Hunter, and Ryan.

I learned so much about the Irish revolution, like how it technically started in the 1100’s but there were 800 years of buildup, violence, and little rebellions until the actual impactful actions in 1916. Our first project was an individual project of making info graphics about our revolutions, so we could learn a little bit about our revolution. Then we met as a group and it was really interesting to see all of the different research done by everyone! From there we combined all of our research to make a logical chain of events. 

Our group was particularly excited for building our metaphor machine. As well as a machine we had to make a documentary which mostly Matteo, Ryan and Finn made. Check it out here in Matteo‘s blog! We took the idea of a Rube Goldberg machine, which is a series of events and reactions that are pieced together to trigger a continues flow of energy from beginning to end. We started planing our machine. With each stage of the revolution we connected a connection. In total we had 8 connections. It was quite the process building our machine. We learned so many things, like unfortunately hot glue isn’t water proof. 

The actual exhibition was chaotic as always! The positive was that’s our group was really good at our speaking parts. Something that we could grow on was not loosing our marbles, literally and metaphorically! Our negative was a track from our machine fell off our machine, and landed in our bucket of water and red die mid presentation!

This revolution ended in 15 people getting executed, which we represented with 15 marbles falling to our bucket of red die. Thank goodness that the exhibition didn’t end that violently! 

I don’t know that much about what project next for just us PLP 9s, but as for most of PLP, the 8s, 9s, and 10s, there’s gonna be a whole lot of chaos and duck tape!

Thanks for reading!

-Ailie 💜

Don’t worry, or maybe you should worry. You’re not alone.

Hello everybody!!

“Her phone ringtone echoed through the house for the third time in the past three minutes. She knew she shouldn’t, but she picked up the phone and answered the call.” 

Do you like thrillers? If you do, you’ll love the ones we just made! Our most recent project was making a short 2 minute thriller!

 First, we watched some thriller clips for some inspiration and learned more about how films were made. The most important thing we learned was the 3 C’s and how they are the most important parts of a thriller. The 3 C’s are the clock, the contract and the crucible. The clock is the addition of time pressure, the contract is a promise to be delivered by the end of the film and the crucible is a box that contains your character. 

Once we had learned these things, we started to create our own thriller! We was our group of 4 members, Maddie, Evelyn, Me and Melissa. Our story was: one day the main character Cecile starts to get anonymous phone calls. She keeps picking up, there’s only noise like static or heavy breathing on the other end, so she hangs up and goes back to reading her book. Now she’s concerned. When she here’s a crash upstairs she goes to investigate. She doesn’t know what to do. Who is upstairs, and who is on the other end of the phone??

I was on a vacation in Mexico for the filming, but I got to do the editing! It was a really fun project, and process to make the thriller. So, without further ado our thriller: Not Alone!

Thanks for reading and watching! Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel!

-Ailie 💜

You would get hypothermia in seven minutes if you swam in that lake!

That day I woke up at noon, I needed to leave soon. A lake named after a loon. A spork is a fork and a spoon. I’m running out of oon words. Anyway, Hi! Recently we went on a surprise PLP trip to a place called loon lake! It’s a wonderful facility with a huge lake in the middle and amazing food. Our sleeping quarters were in the student centre with the boys and girls on either sides of the gym. 

As always we had a driving question and learning objectives. The driving question was: How do the choices we make set our future path? During the time we were at loon lake we did multiple different activities. Some physical, like the high and low ropes corses, rock climbing, archery etc. As well as some metal, like our workshops with pinnacle pursuits, a company who helped organize our trip, and its representative Johno. During all of those activities we focused on processing, analyzing and decision-making. Like how on high ropes we had to work with our partners, if we were going on the high wobbly bridge, to get across together!

I learned so much about my classmates, while having so much fun!! One of the activities we did was trust falls. We worked our way up from doing trust falls with a group in a circle, to doing trust falls with a partner getting farther and farther away, and finally doing trust falls into a group of 8 people from standing on a chair on a table! Everyone always caught each other, and if we didn’t already, we learned to trust each other. Another activity was the talent show, where you got to show the class a talent of your choice. The final activity was the funky dance party! It was so fun singing and dancing with flashy multicoloured lights and light up glasses!

My goal/take away from that trip was, we all bonded together as a group! As that bond is now strong, my goal is to uphold and strengthen it as we grow together through high school. Bye for now! Up next, flags will be flying, cannons will be shot, and PLP will be absolute mayhem!

-Ailie 💜

I need a speech language pathologist to say speech language pathologist!

Hello hello!!

Speech language pathologist! Say that 5 times fast! That’s my aunt’s job, a speech language pathologist. So, for take your kid to work day I went to one of the schools my Auntie Ruth works at. I feel like I learned that I would like to be some sort of a teacher for work, and speech pathology is pretty fun, but I would probably like to be just a regular teacher. Now, that’s not my aunt’s fault, and I have nothing against, and wasn’t turned against speech pathology.

Let me explain the process of how the day went. There was a kid in kindergarten on the autism spectrum who we made instructional videos for, for things like washing your hands, to make things easier for him to understand. Then we had a speech therapy session with a girl who was learning how to pronounce her sh, s and z. The things my aunt does to help her pronounce the sounds are really cool! She helped show the girl what shapes she had to make with her mouth to say the sounds. After lunch we worked with one more girl who my aunt just met. She needed help with pronouncing her r’s.

I learned that with the children, if they get help with their pronunciations then they learn pretty quickly how to speak them properly. Speech language pathologists are pretty important, because their job can help little kids speak freely, and properly and be better understood. Now I know that in the future, when I hopefully become a teacher, I can apply some of the lessons and learning from my aunt’s speech pathology strategies to help make learning fun for my students! My aunt is also very resilient and patient, so I hope to learn to be like that.

The really cool thing is that I was using Canva to make my video. Our video was an assignment that all of us in PLP 9 were assigned to make to showcase our experience, and interview someone. When we were editing the instruction videos for the kindergarten student, I realized that I could utilize Canva to edit the videos more efficiently and add things to make them easier to understand. So I did just that! My aunt and the kindergarten teacher were very happy with the videos. Technically, I did work at work!!

Here’s my video:

So now I know about speech pathology! Hopefully now you do too!!

-Ailie 💜

P.S. I also want to be an Uber driver!

 

Run! Run! Runnnn A Remake!

Hi everyone!!

Have you ever been running through a forest, with the feeling that you’re being followed??? Well I was followed through the forest by a creepy person dressed in black…. In a short film! Don’t worry!!

In Maker for the past few weeks we had to recreate a video called “Run”. It was quite the process but we did it! This project was a group project! My group members were Syd, Caelum, Kai, and Sebastian. We went into this project with some knowledge about camera angles. That knowledge we took, and literally ran with!! Throughout the whole process of making the video we made different plans, tried new filming techniques and just plainly had a lot of fun!

We made our first draft like it was going to be our final draft, but then our class watched all of the videos and submitted critique, so that we could improve them. Here is my group’s first draft:

 

A few things were done to improve our video and make a final draft. The first thing we did was film most of the shots again, then Caelum did most of the editing and it was perfect!

Here’s the final product:

And of course no video comes without its mishaps and dance breaks! Here are the bloopers!:

Thanks so much for reading my blog post! And remember, if you think someone’s following you, just run!! Bye!!

 

-Ailie 💜 

I’m sorry, but there’s no cure.

Have you ever lived in a society based off of the Middle Ages?? No?! Really? Well I did for four days in class!

Our class was called Nation X and we were put into 4 different groups.

Group A the peasants, whose task was to write a 100 word letter every day for 1 dollar.

Group B the merchants, that was my group! I ran the shop for all of the groups with Mika. Our daily task other than running the shop was writing a 50 word letter about our day! Since it was a monarchy and the king read the letters, we had to make them king positive.

Group C the knights/nobility had a lot of freedom. They ran the jail, and they didn’t have to have a lot of reason to arrest someone.

Group D the clergy/monarchy were the most important class. They were a small group, and had one king who was in charge of everything.

We got to read the news every day to let us know what was happening. The king paid us our daily wage. Since I ran the shop with Mika we got paid a dollar more wage a day.

In the end the king was overthrown. Diseases were spread, resulting in health care being made. We created a council of one person from each group. A military was created in threat of war from other nations. Weapons were made by groups A and B. Our nation was ready for war. It was a fair democracy. We were all doing pretty great, except for the fact that I’m still dying of disease. I never got a cure, so am I going to die??

Here’s what’s up with my Alberta book! Come take a look!

Hi everyone, welcome back to my blog!

“The world reveals it’s self to those who travel on foot.”- Werner Herzog. If you read my maker post you’ll know that we had a grade 9 PLP field study already, and that we did a lot of walking! If you haven’t already read my maker post here’s a link to it. https://www.blog44.ca/ailieh/2023/10/12/173/. In that post I talked about the maker aspect of our Alberta Field study, and how we made videos to tell a story. 

In humanities, our question was, how is the geography of the west shaped who we are today? How did we answer this? Another one of our field study books! If you haven’t read another one of my posts: We were Ore-gone for a while but now we’re back, then here it is. https://www.blog44.ca/ailieh/2023/06/09/112/. It explains what we did last year on our grade 8 field study in Oregon, and it also has the book that we did last year embedded in it!

The most important thing we learned about on this trip, was the five themes of geography. Location, Place, Geography Human environmental interaction and Movement. Our job in Alberta, was to find examples of each of these elements. We made comic life’s depicting these elements! Mine is included in my book.

This time our book was made up of, after choosing photos from each place, answering the same three questions for each place. What is geography through one or more of the Five Themes of Geography? What is the historical significance of this photo? Your own connection to the photo?

I enjoyed all of the places, but if I had to pick my favourite it would have to be the Sulfure Mountain hike, and the view from the top! Here’s what we saw when we were up there.


I really enjoyed the format of this book and had a lot of fun gathering this information by the experiences I had! My book took quite a lot of editing, but the end product I’m very happy with! I had a cartoon character that I used in my Oregon book and I made an older version of it for this book.

So here it is:

 Thanks for reading, hope you like my book!

-Ailie 💜