Month: January 2019

Hey everyone, this blog post is about the mPOL, where we explain our learning story by answering the driving question, “how are you going to progress as a learner before the end of the school year?”

First I’m going to talk about humanities. There are definitely some assignments I’m not proud of this year, and a bunch of them were from humanities. The main ones I think I could’ve done better in are the worldview explain everything, the Oregon field school reflection, and some of my other blog posts. I had so many things I could’ve talked about in the Oregon reflection, and my worldview explain everything had plenty of areas that could have easily been improved on. All of them could’ve been better if I just put a bit more time and effort into them, but I procrastinated and did them at the last second. I feel like these assignments didn’t really meet my standards, so I’ve been trying harder to do more work ahead of time and not procrastinate, and I think I’ve improved a bit so far, but I still have some improving to do. I also learned a lot of interesting things in humanities, like how worldview works, and all the different things that impact it, and how different people represent them in the real world.

Next is maker, like in humanities, I think I could’ve done better on some assignments, mostly some of the student blogging challenge posts. I also kinda left some of them to the last minute, but I think I still did a good job on most of them. The student blogging challenge was overall a positive experience, and it was cool to visit other people’s blogs and see what they did and what their opinions and interests were, but If I’d started managing my time better then I definitely could’ve done better than I did.

Now I’m going to talk about science, which is personally my favourite subject, because I really like learning how things work and impact our daily lives. We were mainly learning about plate tectonics, and we had to make a children’s book to show our knowledge. I think I did a pretty good job on it, but I think if I hadn’t left it to the last second I could’ve done even better.

https://read.bookcreator.com/aNLwIlTfjKfQ07JqKpiuxfGJ4cp1/Dvfqdth8Sb-85Jjpkm69Ww

On the other side of the spectrum there’s math, which I find kind of boring and as a result I got distracted a lot during class. However, I have been improving my focus and as a result have been more attentive in class and have been doing much better than I was at the beginning of grade eight. There aren’t really any assignments to talk about because it’s math.

Last but not least, I’m going to talk about PGP. We’ve been doing lots of things lately to improve our organization and time management, which has helped me out a lot in my war on procrastination. Lately we’ve been reading about goal setting and how to be more organized by time blocking and using things.

So for the driving question, I am going to progress by managing my time better and being more organized. I’m going to supplement this by using things more often, making a more precise schedule (and sticking to it) and then I should be able to meet my standards, because I know I can do some really good work if I put my mind to it and don’t get distracted. So now that I’ve been using time blocking and things, what are some more ways I can manage my time and stay on task?

The worldview project is finally over! And it definitely went out with a bang. I’m going to talk about the conclusion of the project and what we did leading up to it. The first project of the unit was to make a short video in an app called Explain Everything which showed the evolution of our worldview, mine isn’t too good because I was having a lot of problems with it, but here it is anyway. The next thing we did wasn’t really a project, it was a field study where we visited religious places of worship like a Buddhist temple, a church, a mosque, and some others. It was mostly so that we could get a firsthand experience of what the religions were like, and what their worldviews were like.

The final project of our worldview unit was the winter exhibition, where we show off everything we’ve learned in one giant project. Before we get to that part, I’m going to talk about how we made our exhibit. The religion our group was studying was Christianity. First, everyone in the group had to make their own photo documentary, which is basically a bunch of photos in a row that tell a story. We used the photos from our field studies at the various places of worship, and selected the best ones to use in our documentary. Then we put them out for everyone to see during the exhibition. The link to my photo documentary is here.

The second step was to design a poster that would be projected onto the wall. We had to make several drafts of it, all of which are in this slideshow:

The first draft was just a rough idea, and the next two were two different options for if we used that style. We decided to ditch the cross though, because it didn’t give us enough room for drawings. The next drafts really just had updated drawings, but the main changes were the switching of the priest to Jesus, and the background colour being changed to orange. Now that our group had finished the poster and the photo documentaries, it was time to design our exhibit. Our tables were laid out like this:

All the tables were covered with yellow paper, and each table had something on it. On table two and three we had voting covers with photos on them, they were hiding the projector to make our exhibit more pleasing to the eye. On table four we had snacks (hot cross cookies and fishy crackers) and on table five we kept our iPads with the photo documentaries playing on them. On table two we also had an activity where you would write down your Christmas wish (the exhibition took place just before winter break) and then we would hang them on a fish mobile we made (because the fish is a symbol of Christianity) and it would be a piece of art if we got enough people to do the activity. Table one didn’t really have anything on it. The actual exhibition went really well, we got lots of Christmas wishes for our fish mobile, and lots of people were asking us questions about different parts of our exhibit, which we would answer and they would walk away knowing more than they did before. Overall I think the exhibition was a big success, although I think I could’ve innovated more during the design process.

Now to the question in the title, and the driving question of the unit, how is religious worldview represented in the real world? Well, each different religion, and therefor, each different religious worldview, has different beliefs, and those are expressed through their religious practices that are unique to them. For example, a Muslim prays five times a day, which is a representation of their worldview. Religious ceremonies/rituals/etc are also real life representations of worldview, because they usually include their beliefs and values in some part of the event. Anyways, that’s pretty much it, the links to my group members blogs are here: http://www.blog44.ca/matthewt/, http://www.blog44.ca/hollyr/. http://www.blog44.ca/felixl/. http://www.blog44.ca/kaiar/