Hi everyone, welcome to another one of my project reflections. Now this one was another short project, but I’m actually starting to quite like these lengths- as often times they require developing our writing skills. In our final product, our end goal was to have persuaded an audience of our choice through text. 

“How can we use our voices to effect change?”

In order for our products to be successful in the end, we had done several activities and assignments. What I believed helped me the most when it came to the success in my persuasive text was reviewing the 6+1 traits, reading examples of persuasive texts as well as reflecting on them and keeping my writing record throughout the course of the project. The 6+1 traits and persuasive text examples were very effective in giving me inspiration, as well as figuring out what approaches I would take to persuade my own audience.

The next step we took in our project was to choose and narrow down our topics. Although I really enjoyed the freedom of choosing a topic that I was passionate about, this was probably the least enjoyable part of the project for me as it required me to change my topic a few times. As this was a short project, I wasn’t able to choose one that was too complex as it would require much more time. I finally decided that I would convince my little brother to shave his facial hair – making the topic and audience not too complicated, while still giving me a decent challenge as my brother doesn’t enjoy being proven wrong. 

To take the first step in creating my persuasive text, I had to put myself in my brother’s shoes to figure out the best techniques I could use to convince him. I figured that I would approach things that are of value to him, as well as things that he knows will be in the future. I also needed to make sure my word choice would be done correctly, as to not make him think that I’m attacking him, but looking out for him. I followed up with a short interview with him, which confirmed what I had already thought and provided me with a few extra things that turned out to be quite helpful. 

After writing up my first draft, we had a critique session in class. My classmates gave me some advice on what I could tweak a little that would make all the difference to persuading my audience. There was one sentence in particular, regarding hygiene, that stuck out from the rest of the text and came off a different way than I had hoped. After creating my second draft, I presented it to my brother. He had a couple things he said he didn’t like such as mentioning “crushes” and saying a couple words that I wouldn’t usually use while speaking to him. On the other hand, he told me that he was convinced and asked our mom to buy a razor the next time she goes shopping – so overall…a success! 

This was actually a great project for me, as I’ll always enjoy learning ways to improve my writing. The skills I learned from this will definitely be somethings that I’ll find quite helpful in the future. Coming out of this project, I feel much more confident in my own persuasive writing skills which will definitely be something beneficial to me in the near future. Something that I would’ve done differently however, would’ve been creating more literature notes from those examples we read in class, much earlier on in the project rather than the last two texts we read.

This week, we got our podcast episodes done and are now awaiting feedback. This project is coming to an end, and so is the school year!

Now as for this weeks post, when you think about the music in the 1950s, you can’t help but think about Elvis Presley. So let’s talk a little about his life. 

Born in Tulepo, Mississippi, in 1935, Elvis is known as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century. He was reffered to as “ The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, but this genre of music had actually already been around. His music was actually inspired by African-American music. Elvis started recording in 1954 at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips. He was on rhythm acoustic guitar with lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black.  

Something super impressive was that because Presley grew up poor, he actually never recieved any real music training and could not read music, so he studied and played by ear. 

Presley’s first song “Heartbreak Hotel” was released in 1956 and became a #1 hit in the US. 

In his music, Elvis’ lyrics contain alot of vulgar words and references to sex, which attracted teenagers growing up at this time. However, parents weren’t the biggest fans of his music. Believing that it was a terrible influence and would corrupt their children. So, this career led Elvis to have great success, but initial controversy. He did concerts, made alot more music and appeared in films and tv.

Interesting fact, I had interviewed my grandma for this project, and she mentionned that not only did she love Elvis Presley but so did her mom, who had no problem with it. Although they were french-canadian, and probably didn’t understand most of the words. 

Family wise, Elvis Presley married a woman named Priscilla Beaulieu in 1967, but they sepperated 5 years later. They also had one child together named Lisa Marie Presley who also had a career in the music business, recording 3 albums. She has also been married 4 times, including to Michael Jackson. 

Unfortunately, years of prescription drug abuse seriously damaged Elvis’ health and he died suddenly in 77’ at the age of 42. 

To this day, Elvis is the best-selling solo music artist of all time. He won 3 Grammy Awards, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (age 36) and has been included in multiple music halls of fame. He also holds several records: the most RIAA ceritified gold and platinum albums, the most albums charted on the Billboard 200, and the most number-one albums by a solo artist on the UK Albums Chart. 

Hello and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be reflecting on our final maker project from Grade 9, Bluesky. In case you didn’t know, at the end of every school year in the PLP program, we would host a spring exhibition at the school. But, with this whole Covid-19 situation, there were quite a few changes that needed to be made. First of all, we couldn’t do it at the school because of obvious reasons. So, as we did our DI provincial tournament, we hosted it online for anyone who would want to watch, to see our presentations. 

For this years bluesky, our projects were based on The Global Goals, created by The United Nations. These goals are 17 different goals that were agreed upon world leaders that they have the power to create a better world by 2030; ending poverty, fighting inequality and addressing the urgency of climate change.

Here was my pitch for my project idea:

The elderly need help since they can’t usually risk leaving their house because they don’t want to get effected by the disease so, I created a service and a website that helps with everyday essentials for the elderly such as groceries or staying in contact with their friends and family that are outside their homes. For groceries, I made a system where they can put in their order number, address, etc so that me or one of my volunteers would deliver it to their door. Although, there are a couple local stores that do offer delivery services, I made a way that mine would be much more affordable. Since the volunteers helping would not be payed(they would be receiving double or triple the volunteer hours instead) therefore, lowering the price. For communication, I made links to youtube tutorials on how to get set up on gmail and zoom, also teaching them the basics of them so they can communicate with their friends and families! Plus, I had some extra links, linking them to websites giving them the latest updates on COVID. Having these all in just one, simple to use website, makes it much more efficient and much easier for elderly to use. 

After everyone figured out what they were doing and everyone had a general idea of what goals related to their projects the most, we were put into our groups. For this years Bluesky, it was a collaboration between the grade 8’s, 9’s and 10’s. We were all separated into 6 different groups: Consumption, Home, Public, Economic Inequities, Water and Climate and Energy. My group was Economic Inequities which was about goals 8 and 10. 

The way our presentation worked was that we only had about 2 minutes to present for our whole group. So, what we did for our presentation was to have two people say a short introduction and then have only 6 instead of 11 people present the pitch of their projects. And the end, we did a quick game. This way, everyone had a role in our presentation and we didn’t have to go overtime. 

Here was my Launch Journal:

Click here to see the link to the website I created.

In all, I would say that our bluesky presentation went just as we had planned and practiced. On the other hand, I still don’t think that we made our presentation as exciting and engaging as we wanted. But if we were to do so, it would make it much harder to incorporate our actual projects in the presentation. My group and I (Jordyn, Alex, Brenton, Holly, Ryan, Asha, Kate, Nya, Dries, Sophia and Evelyn), all worked pretty well together. Although we did have a couple disagreements at times, we all showed up to our group meetings on zoom as much as we could and made sure that everyone had a say in forming our final presentation.

-Alex

Hello and welcome back to my blog! Since you have probably seen the title or my last blog post, this is sort of a part two to my last one except that this time it’s provincials!

If you’d like to see my last blog post and to see what DI is then click here. My group members are Holly, Ben, Liam, Emily and Matthew. 

Now let’s get started!

Team choice element #2:

So, for Regionals, our second team choice element wasn’t great. If you look back at my regionals post, in the video presentation; don’t you remember the background music? 

Anyways, after regionals, we knew that we absolutely had to come up with a better idea and this time, we had more time. During spring break, we texted and met up (the people who weren’t away).  We brainstormed and brainstormed until we came up with….drum roll please..a mural. Yep, that’s right. Haven’t you ever seen or heard of one of those painted murals on the walls of coffee shops (specifically starbucks)? Well, in case you didn’t know, our presentation just happened to be based on a coffee shop, better yet, Starbucks. Plus, we made it a two in one; a backdrop and a team choice element!

Here was our final product:

Team choice element: Something that the team has chosen to include in performance that is not required in the rules of the road.

Team work:

Over the past two months or so, we all definitely got closer; when we met up after school, during school, etc. Which impacted our results in our instant challenge(s). We stoped cutting each other off with better ideas, we made sure everyone talked and had a head in the solution and it took us way less time to get stuff done.

This is a picture from DI Regionals

Story/script:

If you saw the performance at regionals, you may have noticed our fancier costumes that were kind of dated (minus the barista and the lumber jack). That was because we wanted to make our a story based in the 1920’s. We realized that the only hint about that was our costumes and not even that was clear. It didn’t make much sense so, we decided to get rid of the whole 1920s theme because it was just useless.

Also, in our story, we added so much more comedy than there was at regionals which we thought was pretty necessary in our performance.

Backdrop

Yes, I did talk about the backdrop a little bit in the mural but the backdrop part also really improved. Here is the backdrop at Regionals.

I apologize for the blurryness, this was a screen shot taken during our performance at Regionals. As you can tell, the top right corner of our backdrop was falling apart.

Overall learning experience

So some people may think that DI (Destination Imagination) is useless, that it’s too hard and that you don’t learn much from it. Well, I think that DI has really taught me different ways to use my creativity (you can do anything with cardboard!), it teaches you to cope better with stress (because DI is pretty darn stressful!), it teaches you to work efficiently under pressure (instant challenges) and, most importantly,  it teaches you teamwork (even if it’s with people that you don’t work well with).

Also, DI isn’t as easy as it seems, here is what I thought was the hardest:

• Trying to be extra creative while being under pressure
• Including every team member in the imagination of a solution
• Dealing with time vampires
• Deadlines and time management
• Trying to always be productive and get lots of work done every chance you get

Regionals what a lot like a wake up call for my team and I; after regionals, we knew exactly what we had to get done and focus on the most to improve. We were also so much more organized and experienced (of course).

Anyways, overall, I think that we did improve a ton at provincials and now I’m even more experienced and sort of know what to expect next year! Also, at provincials, my team and I ended up in 3rd place for our team challenge and 1st for our instant challenge! Yay! Destination Imagination was an amazing experience and I can’t wait for next year!