by Alex -

mPOLs!

So far, this year, it has been pretty great. PLP has really influenced my worldview. I now have many skills that I have learned to develop thanks to this program. Quote from Ally: “Only in PLP ladies and gentlemen”. PLP is a sort of program that we learn inside and outside of the classroom, for example, we have gone on some pretty amazing field trips to enhance our learning in ways I’ve never thought of before.  Here is a link to my reflection on our Oregon field school.

So, you may be asking, what is an mPOL? Well, an mPOL is a mid-year presentation of learning. Yes, that may be a little too fancy for you, so let me do one better. Have you ever heard of a student led conference? Well, in case you haven’t, it says it in the name, it’s basically like a parent-teacher conference except that it’s the student that does most of the talking..and that’s in charge of it. It’s between you, your teachers and your parents. The student is the one that presents what they have learned. Wait, no, no, in my case, you present the best examples of the opportunities you had to progress as a learner.

I really enjoy the difference of how we learn here in PLP, it may require more homework and hard work (haha, you see what I did there), which makes it more of a challenge. Lucky for me, I enjoy a good challenge. 

So let’s just get on into it. First, I will start with Humanities (English Language arts + Social studies), it was pretty hard to choose one thing that we did since I think that all of them were a pretty big challenge for me, but, I decided to choose the advertising unit. You can see my blog posts about advertising here and here. 

I think that visiting Pound & Grain was pretty inspiring but on the other hand, you would think that that would be enough motivation. I feel that I could’ve pushed my creativity farther with the look of the ads that I made (especially the first one, the deep cove ad). If I were to redo it again, the look of it would be way more eye appealing. This showed that I need to feel more motivated/inspired  when coming up with those sort of ideas. So, looking at tons professional ads made from big companies and finding out what technique and appeals I could use in my ads. Ever since this project, I have had my eye on it for some possibilities of what to do in the future, although, I may want to stay with my life long dream of becoming a veterinarian. In conclusion of this subject, I have learned that advertising requires imagination and creativity in order to make successful ads. 

Now for science, to end our unit about tectonic plates, we were each assigned to make a children’s book that would educate kids about tectonic plates and other things related to the subject such as volcanoes and earthquakes. I kind of left mine to the last minute, which was obviously not a good thing to do. At the end, it wasn’t all that bad. The storyline was represented pretty well but, I feel like I could have made my information on the plates a little more clear or in smaller sentences, especially for the purpose of our audience that the book is supposed to be written for. That taught me a lesson to never leave things to the last minute again because, I will definitely regret it and it won’t turn out as awesome as I’d like it to be. 

 

Let’s move on to math, something that I don’t really enjoy doing in this wonderful subject is, fractions. For one of our units, we did operations on fractions. Because of me disliking this certain unit, it took me longer to do the assignments/hand ins because I would rather talk to my friends or just do something else that would lead me to procrastinate. One thing that I am going to work on is that even if I don’t like something, I need to finish all of it first, then I could do other homework that I have, because that’s what the class is for. I need to work the same way I do in all my other classes. Because, homework that is not done at school is done at home and I do not have that much time after school because of all my activities. 

Now let’s talk about Maker. The thing that I enjoyed most doing was my blog. Since I am half French and went to a French school, I think that there is a drastic difference between my writing at the beginning of the year and now. At the beginning of the year, one of my goals was to start writing more in order to get better at it. So, my idea was to start a journal, at the start, I didn’t write in it much because I always forgot. Now, a sneak peak to the next subject, I time-blocked when I was going to do this every night or so. In my blog, we also did a student blogging challenge. Where, every week we have a certain subject and certain tasks to complete. Which means that the quote “Practice and practice then, you’ll get there” or something along those lines is indeed true. Because, I tried pretty hard to get my writing from horrible and not understandable to decent and more understandable which is a pretty big difference if you ask me.

For the last thing that I am going to talk about today is PGP. PGP stands for “Personal Growth Plan” basically, it helps you become a better student. In PGP, we learned how to do things like time blocking and goal tracking. We have been given a book to read that helps you with those things called “What do you Really want”, including a journal which would mean that we would have to write on paper… DUH..DUH..DUUUUHHH! I have decided that I am going to time block at least once a week to plan out the following week, maybe month (if I have time). The one big bad work habit that I have is procrastinating. For example, when I’m at home doing homework, I get a notification, then I check it thinking “only for a few minutes” or “just this one notification”… but 30 minutes or so later… I’m still on it. I have been trying to work with that, turning off my notifications, deleting my social media’s, etc. 

To conclude, in this past couple months, I have learned so much, from the field schools to just in the classroom in general. Just like I said at the beginning, this year has been great and I think that I have really improved over the past couple months, the difference is crazy. I have one last question to end it all today since I’d like to improve as a learner, how can I limit myself from distractions as well as procrastinating less in order to work more productively and ethically in and outside of the classroom?

by Alex -

Winter Exhibtion 2018/19

I borrowed this picture from Gabby E (with permission of course!), go checkout her blog!

On December 21st, was what I thought to be one of the most stressful nights of my life so far but, it turns out, that it wasn’t even that bad! Drum role pleeeasee….it’s called the..Winter exhibition!

Well, you probably already read the title so, let me explain what the Winter exhibition really is about, so this special night is presented by each grade in PLP, in which each grade has their own assigned area to present their work. This Exhibition is supposed to be the last and final big project of our first half of the year. In my case (grade 8), we were assigned to do ours about religion, specifically eastern and western ones; Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism. 

Before we did the exhibition, we all had the chance to learn at least a little bit about each of these religions and visit each religion’s place of worship. My group (Rhiann, Kaden and Jude), were assigned Sikhism.

There were quite a few steps to accomplish before the exhibition, first, we had to make a poster explaining the 7 aspects of worldview; Geography, time, beliefs, society, values, economy and knowledge. Second, we had to preserve food/a beverage for the audience. Third, to create a game/activity for the audience to take part in. And fourth, we also had to bring some decorations to make the stand look better overall and to plan how it’s going to be set up. 

So, let’s start with the first part of course, the poster. The main use of the poster was to show the audience the worldview of the Sikhs. Click here to see my post about wordview if you’d like to learn more.

Here is our first draft, it honestly looked a lot more clean and organized than the other posters but, our idea wasn’t the best since it had the exact same one as the example poster that our teachers showed us for inspiration. Our teacher also decided to rank us from best to worst posters because it would also help us with our competitive sides to always have the best one. 

Here is our second draft, we tried to make our poster a lot better, by that, I mean get rid of our first poster and recreate a fresh, new idea. Just like what we were supposed to do, we needed to represent the seven aspects of worldview, or just the worldview of the followers of our religion’s worldview. So, this poster doesn’t exactly LOOK good, but the idea certainly was ALOT better.The colours may not look like a good choice for the background but, they are the main colours of the Sikh religion. For rankings, surprisingly got second place.

 So our third draft, I think that it certainly looked a lot better. We had the idea and look right ish, we just needed to tweak up some parts a little then we would be ready to go. Just like, change our phrases/make them shorter and edit/clean up the visuals. For rankings, we got first place.

Here is our fourth draft, we changed the words up, tried to experience with a new font and add a filter on the food to make it look more like a drawing since the other visuals were too. For the rankings, we got third place. 

Finally, our fifth draft, we decided to trash the idea of using a new font, we decided that we liked our old one better. We also, did had a little finishing touch with the words, then we were done! 

Next, is the food/drink. My group wanted to make some food that the would look appealing/taste good for the audience and be easy to transport. Since Curry was way too hard to transport, we looked at making Lassi. Lassi is a Sikh drink that is basically a mango flavoured yogurt smoothie. We also decided on making sugar cookies with orange icing on top. 

Next, the fourth step, our activity, the activity that we did was a sort of Jeopardy, if you’d like to check it out, click here. The majority of the information was on the poster except for the bonus questions.

Now for the last step before presenting, was our station planning/appearance, since I was so busy and with all of these things on my mind about the exhibition, I did not think about taking pictures so to make an easier visual for you, here is a drawing bellow. 

So, those orange boxes that you see are exactly in the name, they to show our very best pictures from the sikh temple that we visited. Next to our left box, we have our photo documentaries that are basically a slideshow of the best pictures that we took of the religious sites with a specific theme, mine was symbols. Here is a link if you would like to watch it. Then, we have our activity followed by the food and another box with our poster drafts. 

We were also presenting our photo documentaries which were our best photos from our feild studies to all the religious sites that we went to as a class.  Here is mine if you’d like to watch it.

 

In conclusion, just like what I said at the beginning, this exhibition which was thought to be super stressful, was not. This proves that when you are well prepared, you stress a lot less. I really enjoyed this experience and I’m super excited to do it again! I think that my group worked very well together, we all split our tasks equally for example, Jude was in charge of the Jeopardy game, Rhiann and I were in charge of food, and so on. We also all presented pretty well, we spoke clearly and loud enough. 

See you in my next blog post! 

~Lexie😜