While my classmates were at Loon Lake, I was home. There were like 20 people in the gr 10 PLP class that went to the Loon Lake retreat trip for 5 days. Guess what, I didn’t go but it lowkey wasn’t my decision becuase my parents decided that but they thought Toronto would be such more of an experience. The lakers did a climbing wall…. Fun fact, climbing walls aren’t my thing. Instead of going to Loon Lake, I gave those days to myself. It was only a 3 day week becuase Monday and Friday was pro D, that was a score. The first 2 days I went to my grandmas house and stayed there overnight to hang out with her and help her around the house. The third day my dad and I went on an arrands trip and got stuff done! Then I went to last class so Madeline can have a bit of emotional support there. We made a juicy or streaky video too:
I didn’t really take notes on my adventurous 3 days but I did take a photo with Tucker in the truck when we were waiting for my dad in the ski shop and sharing a bag of fishy crackers (the fishy crackers didn’t make it into the photo, I’m holding up bread).
Throughout the next 5 days, I want to focus on being ready for bed before 11 so I can get a good nights rest and be ready to conquer the next day. I will keep track of my progress bu checking my clock when I’m done. Unfortunately I wont be able to take photos because I’m lowkey not supposed to be on my iPad or phone past 11….
The big takeaway from that week, is take some time for yourself. Do activities for YOU and not for other people. Go spend time with family! Treat yourself once in a while and get your nails done or something becuase your the person your going to be spending every second of your day with.
“Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback.”
I just wanted to say I’ve learned a lot throughout the year.
Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?
If I’m being honest, I don’t feel like I’m ready to move onto the next grade level because life is moving a bit fast. In 3 years I’m going to be in grade 12 and that is a bit hard to believe and it’s also scary. Let’s look back onto my vision, mission and values.
VMV
Vision
If you don’t know what the “vision” is, it’s “the ideal future state that describes you on graduation day”. My vision just talks about me looking back onto the earlier grades and spending my money on applying for university’s, yada yada. But the thing is, on my graduation day; I just want to be smiling.
Mission
Mission is “your purpose for this school year that aligns actions with your vision”. I wrote: This school year, I really hope that I improve at everything. Focusing in class, better grades, getting better at soccer. The 2 biggest things that tower over those things are my organization and time management. I won’t get anywhere in life if I’m not organized, have good grades and can manage my time better.
I guess some things never change because I’m still improving at all of that.
Values
My values are “the success behaviours you will use to achieve your mission”.
Conduct, ethics and integrity. I write about being more foucused on the task at hand and staying focused. I think I’ve been pretty good at that.
Preparation. I need to have my Apple Pencil with me (I’ve been doing that), I come to the morning classes at least 5 minutes early. I’ve actually been really good at that. Especially compared to last year. I also talk about handing in my assignments on time or in class. I would say I’ve also gotten better at that. Probably because if I hand in an assignment late, my phone is gone for a week.
Engagement. It basically talks about working actively in class. But then it also talks about keeping focused on the person talking, and keeping my thoughts relevant to what is around me because sometimes I get trailed off and end up searching what made Marilyn Monroe famous.
Humanities
During the year, humanities has been pretty interesting. Probably my 2nd favourite class. Or 3rd. Our most recent project has been making a comic based on ww1.It was really stressful because the timing was really weird. I wish we did this in like February. But it’s ok cuz this is the last Thursday of grade 9.
Maker
The main focus in maker this year was video making. We also read a book called The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. There are 7 habits. We had to make a video with 3 of them every week. We were put into groups. These 2 are my favourite:
Welcome to my blog in 2025. New year new me. Or should I say new year new blog post. How great. Anther one. Anyways, I’m pretty sure this is my first post on a winter exhibition. Let’s get into it.
Driving question
For this project the driving question for this project was:
What factors precipitate ‘revolution’ and how have they shaped the modern world?
Animal Farm
Our last humanities project was on a book called Animal Farm. Animal Farm is a book released in 1945 about a bunch of farm animals who go against their farmer to create a society where they can be “equal” and “free”. If you want a full summary you can probably just search it up. We had to read the entire book. It was a super boring book and I had to summarize some chapters I didn’t understand. Anyways, I’m pretty sure that’s the book that started us on learning about revolutions.
Animal Farm Infographic
After we finished reading Animal Farm (while taking notes along the way) and we did our first assignment in relate to the book, an infographic. If you don’t know what an infographic is, that sucks for you. Just kidding. An infographic is a visual representation of information or data. I didn’t do a very good first one, so I had to revise it. Here is my finished infographic:
The French Revolution
Mr Harris assigned 5-6 people per- group, together. Once we sat down in our groups, surprise surprise. We got assigned revolutions. I was in a group with Eloise, Liann, Elsa, Samuel and Evelyn. We got assigned the French Revolution. If I haven’t already mentioned, this whole thing is for the Winter Exhibition. I think the teachers did a draw and chose the gr 9’s to do revolutions or something. Idk how this will help us in the future but whatever, it’s already done.
So for my group, the first assignment on the French Revolution was another infographic. What we had to do was research everything about the revolution and put it in infographic form. Here is mine:
After we made our personal infographic, we had to make a group one. So the group one took ideas from different personal infographics. I know a paragraph of mine was used somewhere. We also all used ideas for the layout and design. Here it is:
If you dont know what the French Revolution is here is a little summary:
The French Revolution was from 1789-1799.The revolution began with the Storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, as a response to King Louis XVI’s mismanagement of the economy and disregard for the Third Estate. The National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, enshrining the principles of liberty and equality. Radical Jacobins led by Maximilien Robespierre, seized power and killed King Louis XVI, leading to the Reign of Terror. A guy named Napoleon Bonaparte eventually rose to power. This marked the end of the French Revolution and a beginning of the Napoleonic Empire. The French Revolution, impacted so many people and the society. This shaped modern democracy, politics, and society today.
The Metaphor Machine (Rube Goldberg Machine)
For our main Winter Exhibition piece, we had to make a Rube Goldberg machine from scratch. We started off with a wood sheet. We painted it and got to work. In each revolutions there is at least 10 important parts. So we had to find 10 different parts of the French Revolution and make it able so that a marble can run, and things can move. We had a month to make and have this machine ready to present.
First things first we had to plan it out. This is our draft of what it would look like:
Here is our machine coming together. It’s so funny looking back on it.
We had to plan and gather all the materials we were to be using. For Exhibition day, we brought in some food. Evelyn made cookies that looked like the French flag and I brought in 2 big packs of chocolate croissants. Surprisingly all the food was gone by the end of the night. A guy named Cole Webb decided to eat half of a pack😒.
The night of exhibition went really well. It worked 75% of the time and all was well.
Conclusion:
I had some fun but I don’t look forward to the next exhibition. I mean at least I learned something from this project that I will probably remember. Looks like sleep is calling, we’ll talk later.
Welcome to my presentation of learning. I am the expert of my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for improvement. Thank you in advance for listening and offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.
Main Focuses:
In agency I chose to tell you about “resilience”
In preparation I chose to talk about “outside of school”
And in communication I chose “with peers”
For resilience, I know I definitely give up easily and become discouraged when someone gives me a setback. Most of the time I try to finish what I started, but I do give up sometimes.
Last MPol I was talking about how I wanted to be more organized and manage my time better. I think I definitely improved on that. It’s just taking a lot of time. Thats why for preparation, I chose to talk about outside of school.
Lastly, with peers. I engage when Im in a group and come up with ideas. I will accept feedback, but sometimes I wont change what I already have and forget about what feedback they gave.
Destination Imagination (DI)
A couple months ago we got put into groups for something called Destination Imagination. We were in groups of 5. We had to present something that had art in it. We decided to make a colosseum. It wasn’t massive. It was just a little fold out that we could all crouch behind. It was kinda like a drama presentation. Here are my teammates blogs:
I think DI made me more comfortable with preforming. The hard part about this was remembering my lines. One of my group members had no clue what theirs were and I relied on them to know mine. I also had to learn them in 2 days while I was in Whistler. That was very stressful. On top of that, I was very sick and could barely speak.
Science:
My favourite experiment so far was definitely the Petri Dishes. We collected bacteria from surface areas with Q Tips,wiped them on the Petri Dishes and let the Petri Dishes cook over the weekend. We came back on Monday and took a look at our bacteria. Personally, I chose to swab my iPad and phone. In the end they both had ALOT of bacteria. I learned that I should definitely use a Lysol wipe and wipe my screens more. I would definitely do this project again.
However, our most recent work in science has been on vaccines. After learning a whole buttload about vaccines, we had to make a poster on vaccines and the myths around them. For example, here’s mine. I chose to do it on how the Covid vaccine doesn’t cause autism.
One last thing we did in science was learn about the cells in our immune system. These were the white blood cells, B cells, T cells and macrophage. We also learned about what they’re fighting off, the pathogens.
After learning all that, we had to make little immune system cells. I did mine on Paw Patrol.
Humanities:
As you already know, we took a long drive down the Oregon coast. This is PLP 8 classes first field trip (field study) that we’ve had. The field trip was a week long. Most of my friends have gone to Keats Camp for a week during the summer. But I’ve never done that before. So this was my first time being away from home for a week. One of my worries was not being able to contact my family if something goes wrong. Every couple days, I’d call or text my mom and tell her what we did that day and all that good stuff. I was glad we were able to stay at the hotel first because you realized what you didn’t download on the way there and could do that before bed. I wish we stayed longer at the hotel because I looooved who I shared a room with. I also really liked taking a trip to the ice machine. The ice machine reminded me of Gemma and I’s midnight runs to the ice machines. Those are good memories.
About a week after we came back from Oregon, we had a Spring Exhibition. We were put in groups before we left to Oregon. I was in a group with Brooklyn, Sawyer, Emilia, Robin and Oliver. I think we did pretty well for the time that we had to make it in. We did something like beer pong. You got 3 tries to get the ping pong ball in the cups. If you did you get a 2 Bite Brownie or a cake pop that Emilia made. I think we should’ve found something that drew more people to our ads. Most of the people went straight to the food. But I guess I would rather food over looking at ads.
Conclusion:
Im very happy that grade 8 is almost over. I think one thing I could do next year is check Showbie more often. Next year, Im looking forward to foods and to do more in science.
Hello. This is my mom and dad, Kristina and Lauren and I think Jared’s here too.
Introduction:
Thank you for coming to my mPOL. I am the expert of my own learning. I am also responsible for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We can discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and offering feedback that I could use to improve as a learner.
One thing that I’ve seen that my classmates do that id like to improve on is not leaving work till the last minute. I try to get it done before it’s due but sometimes I’ll hand it in like 5 or 10 minutes after it’s due. I’d also like to work on organization. Im not an organized person. Things doesn’t really help me so sometimes I just write a checklist of everything that I need to get done and that works better.
An example question that we had the option to answer is “did all the work you completed this year meet your standards?”. I’d say no. Some of my work was rushed and I had to redo it. Some of my work was in a group but some people take over. All that kinda stuff. The work that I’m most proud of are my window notes that we did in humanities with Ms Willemse. I think it was good for me to do because you got to relate to stuff that happens and I’m very good at relating. Here are my window notes:
There we go.
Humanities
In humanities I liked writing poems and reading The Outsiders. I like the language arts part of it. Socials on the other hand… is not my favourite. Learning about the world, places in the world, the past is kinda confusing and hard to understand. I think over time I’ll start to like it.
The Learning Plan that we did a while ago
I dont really remember when we did this but we did. It’s a learning plan. One thing we did was set goals and see if they were accomplished by the end of the year. My goals were to complete my work on time or even hand assignments in early and work on my time management.
Work Habits
So… as I was saying earlier im not the most organized person and that I have to work on that. I was also saying about how I use a checklist and check off the work I finished. I like to work really hard, get stuff done, then take a 10 min break and get back to work after that.
The Basics
Revision… So whenever Im bored, looking through Showbie and see a revision emoji, I’ll redo it. But normally my grades get lost in my emails. When I redo it I see what I did wrong and change up some things.
Teamwork… I like working in groups but sometimes that can be hard. There is always 1 or 2 people controlling the group so sometimes people in the group get left out. I like getting in there and helping, but once in a while I will let other people do more of the work.
Responsibility… Im not very responsible. I get most of my work in on time but then sometimes I just forget.
Have you ever wondered how many steps are in a project? How many assignments you have to get done to reach the end? I sure have. For Humanities we had to do our first project with lots of projectsalong the way. At the end of the project, we had to answer the driving question, how can a text help me understand how my worldview is changing. You can see my answer to this if you continue reading.
Reading The Outsiders:
S.E Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was in hight school. It was such an amazing book to read with lots of action. We had to take notes along the way so were prepared if we have any assignments we have time do on it. While we were reading the book, we had to answer something called “Role Sheets”. Role sheets are just sheets that you answer. Sometimes you have to draw something that you could relate to, or you might just be writing a whole bunch of words. Yes, words. Sometimes the questions for me were hard to answer and took a lot of thought. Most of the time it wasn’t fun. Anyways, you get put in these groups, where you’ll share your role sheet with. The groups normally have 2-3 other people and you will do a different sheet every week but there are only 3 in total.
Music Video:
Making The Lyrics.
Up above you read about how we had groups that we discussed our role sheets with. Well surprise surprise, I was with the same group this entire project. Yup, a lot of time with the same people. They were great to work with and kept me on task lots of the time. We got lots of work done as a group. Anyways, back to about the lyrics. Everyone in the group had to write lyrics for the same song, Its The End Of The World As We Know It by R.E.M. My group and I decided that my lyrics went smoother with the original song and just were the best in general. My group members had to change a couple of words because apparently they didn’t make sense.
Singing The Song.
It probably took us 5 times to sing the song as goos as we could do it before getting it right. The lyrics were hard to read and sing really fast because if you listen to the song here you can see that it gets a bit faster throughout it. Our voices are all different. My voice was probably the highest (I don’t know if that’s a good thing). Sorry, that doesn’t really have anything to do with this, but I guess you can hear me in it 😁. I think the recording ended out being pretty good. I had a couple of moments but its all good 👍.
Making The Music Video.
We have 2 music videos. One that we could post on YouTube and one that has a whole bunch of pictures of us and our friends that we don’t want all over YouTube. I did lots of the work on the second video but then another member of the group took out all the photos of us for it to be posted on YouTube. Here is the video:
Worldview MindNode.
This a project that we did closer to the start of this all. We wrote this to help us understand our own worldviews. There were 7 sections we had to write about and how they relate to our own worldview. I did this really last minute so it isn’t the best I could’ve done. Here it is:
Thanks:
Thank you for reading to the end of my post! Have an amazing rest of your day🫶.
Hi guys, welcome back to another post! Today I’m reflecting on my PLP work that I have done so far.
This is my Memoji video that we had to make. It didn’t take me long to screen record and all that but if you watch the first three seconds or so, you’ll see that I couldn’t edit out the music I was playing in the background. Something I could’ve done differently was not listening to the music before screen recording. I also had to re-do my voice overs because there were a lot of noises in the backgrounds before I re-did it. This is my video:
We had a Keynote presentation that we had to fill out with all these cool fidgets and drawings you could make. I am really proud of a Nike shoe we had to design using colour fill. I didn’t use colour fill for the small bits because it was hard to do that without it looking splotchy. I think one thing I could’ve done better was not rushing through it because we still had lots of time. Here it is:
In an app called WordPack, we had to make a WordPack of words that describe yourself. I think I could’ve used some “better”, juicier words to describe myself because some of them don’t really make sense. I could’ve been more creative with the colours. Check it out here:
So who am I as a PLP learner?
I think I am a curious, flexible, open-minded learner. I always have a question about every project and always want to know more. I am flexible and open minded and will normally adjust if a plan gets changed last minute. I love working in groups because then I get to share and hear other peoples ideas on the project that we’re working on.
Thank you for reading to the end of my post!! Have a great day😉.
