We’re halfway through what we’ve been told is, one of PLP’s favourite project of all time. During this time we have learned about the Industrial Revolution and different writing styles. The driving question for this project was, How do revolutions transform the world? Similar to the last project, we are learning about revolutions and the effect they have on everything around us.

 

Revolutions transform the world by taking everything we know and changing it. They take the so called normal and alter it to a new version. For it to be considered a revolution, the events have to be significant enough to have a lasting, widespread effect. In many revolutions it changes the way a society runs for the better, improving the system that was currently in place. It can effect many different aspects of our world, the way a government works, the way we travel, use machinery or how our economy works. A lot of the time it does more than just one or two. The ideas start small, but as they are spread different people have their own ideas and opinions on them, creating something new and bigger than before. Ideas are adapted and built on, without out that, a lot of the events that happened wouldn’t have been significant enough to be part of a revolution.

 

This is my take on the driving question after one week into the project. Next week I’ll have finished the project and will likely have a new take on the question. I will add the link to that post here.

 

One of the first things we were told about this project was that we were going to be cutting up old stuffies and sewing them together. This sounded really exciting, I didn’t really stop to think about how I was going to be using this to learn about the Industrial Revolution. The day we made them I had a lot of fun building my creature, but not a lot of thinking, so when it came to even just giving him a name and starting to create his back story it was a big mind shift for me. This wasn’t a bad thing though, I actually learned from it. When I’m in school I should always be ready to learn, this doesn’t mean no fun, just that I should be in a mind set where I’m ready to learn.

 

The next step would be writing a short story on our creature. To get to that stage we had to learn about the Industrial Revolution, as it had to be part of our story. Through this project and the last we have been learning how to take good, helpful notes. We added all we learned on the Industrial Revolution into our document about Revolutions. Taking notes is a very useful skill for all classes, and learning how to take efficient notes is an important skill. One thing I really like about taking notes, is that you are able to take the information you learned and turn it into your own words. This really helps me remember things, as it is in sentences that I’ve written and already processed.

Part of learning about the Industrial Revolution was to learn how it impacted our world. This revolution spanned many years, and is always changing. The story we would be writing was set in this time period, so we learned about what life was like for people. This helped us create a mood and a setting for our story. At first the whole writing part was difficult for me, trying to come up with all these different ideas and combine them into one smooth story. As I started to fill out a character file, it became easier. I would write down random ideas, and eventually I would narrow things down to a rough idea of what I wanted my character to be. I then built off that, during more stages of the story writing the character would change and develop in a way to fit the story I was creating.

 

Another part of writing, was reading! This is something we did together as a class, taking turns reading out paragraphs. I personally read a lot, and I think it really helped with this part of the project. Being able to understand text is a really good skill, from that you can start to write you own text that is engaging and others can understand. Reading serves as an example of many things, I personally found it really helpful to use as an example of word flow. Getting words and sentences to connect can be difficult, and is something I have found difficult before.  During the writing process, a lot of the time I would pause and read the text I had just written, as if I was reading someone else’s book. This helped me to understand what words or sentences were to much or what need more explaining. Another trick I used while writing was thinking about what I, as a reader, would want to hear. Words that gave good description so I could picture the setting and feel almost like I was there with the character. This is something I want to get better at, I feel there are ways I could write that could be more relatable to the reader.

 

All this learning and knowledge we have built up in this past week are the base for our project and the final products. We have learnt about the Industrial Revolution and the effects it had on the world. We learnt about writing stories, and created our own story for our frankenstuffy. It will be interesting to see how we expand on our learning in the week to come.

 

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

-Margaret Atwood