Monthly Archives: March 2024

The Age of Exploration!

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The Driving Question

“How can we use storytelling to investigate what sparked global exploration and understand its impact?” Our latest humanities project was about the age of exploration. We learned about trade between countries as well as the fur trade between the Europeans and Indigenous.

The Age of Exploration

So what is the age of exploration? Let me explain…The age of exploration is a time where people from different nations discovered that they could trade with different countries around the world. A good thing about it is that people then discovered new technology like the Sextant, Cross staff, compass, astrolabe and a ship called the caravel. A consequence of that was that the Europeans created the fur trade where they would go to the indigenous lands and trade things like blankets, knives, and spices in exchange for beaver skins that they would use to make hats. This meant that the beaver population started to die off and there weren’t many beavers left in the wild. Luckily people started to set up beaver reserves and slowly the beaver populations started to grow again.

The Cause and Consequences of Exploration

we learned about things that were good about exploration and things that were bad and that didn’t work out like how even though they were getting gold and silver so they could sell it to other countries to make money, it started to drain the land of all those resources until there wasn’t much left. We had to make our boards on a website called padlet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Story Mountain

After reading and learning about the age of exploration we had to make up a story based off of what we had learnt. We had to write about a cause and a consequence of exploration, that is why we made the padlet. We had to make a story mountain about our story’s and we had to separate it into sections like the “Climax and the Rising Action.” I wrote about the diseases that spread as a consequence and about how trading with other nations was the cause. I wrote about a girl named Lily who really wants to sail around the world and trade with other countries and nations, but everyone tells her she can’t because she’s a girl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Story

This story is kind of long so you don’t have to read it if you don’t want to but here it is:

There once was a girl named Lily she always wanted to go on voyages but girls weren’t allowed to everyone said that they had to stay home and cool and look after their husbands.

She would stare longingly at the waves looking at the glistening waves in the sunshine. Lily was very sad because she wasn’t allowed to trade so she spent day after day looking out at sea waiting for her adventure to start. 

She had always wanted to travel, she knew it was in her blood because her father was a famous European explorer who went on many voyages a year. He always brought things back for Lily from his voyages but Lily knew it wasn’t the same. She would tell people all around town about her ideas for new technology and new ships, but no one would listen to her and when they did they would give her all the reasons why she couldn’t do it.

Lily loved to talk about traveling and she loved to talk to people about her fathers voyages and how she would always want to explore with him and go with him to trade with the indigenous peoples. She would always ask her father about his voyages when he wasn’t busy and Lily always said she could taste the salt water on her tongue. The idea of going on a ship and exploring the world gives Lily shivers in her spine and not in a bad way but in a good way. 

One day Lily heard that her father was traveling to the indigenous land to trade with the indigenous peoples and so Lily snuck onto the ship and disguised as one of the curfew members. Lily knew that woman weren’t allowed to travel so she dressed up as a man so her father and his crew wouldn’t know. Lily had many ideas for new technology that could help explorers navigate their way around the ocean and she kept it all in her sketchbook. She had never shown any body her ideas and she had always wanted to show her father but she couldn’t, not yet, but she would one day.

One day Lily was working on the ship deck and she saw land! She shouted for her father to come and see and she didn’t realize how close she was to the side of the ship and she fell right in and her disguise came off and everyone realized that it was her. Her father was very mad but they had reached land and then her father was distracted by all the trading. Lily had a great time trading with all the indigenous and she traded them blankets for beaver skins.

After a couple days the indigenous started to come down with a strange disease and then many of them started to die. The indigenous started to blame the Europeans for spreading the disease through their blankets. Lily was very scared and she didn’t want to leave because she had had such a great time trading and she had made many new friends. 

Although Lily had one of the most greatest time of her life she felt guilty that the indigenous had all started to die and she blamed it all on herself. Her father told her not to worry and then she realized the time was right and she showed him all her ideas for new technology that could help explorers navigate their way around the ocean. Her father told her it was a great idea and he told all of Europe and the rest of the world and they started to create all her ideas. Lily realized that her dream had finally come through and everyone had started to respect her and let her explore the world and Lily became one of the most famous European explorers in the world.

AR MAKR

AR MAKR is an app we used to film our story’s. In this app you can film things like a normal camera but you don’t have to place real life objects on the ground on front of the camera like on the normal filing apps. In this app you can take photos from your library and place them on the ground. It will look like you are placing a real life object on the ground from the screen, but from the outside it looks like your filming the ground so it can look kind of funny!😂

Pirate Packs!

Because we were studying the age of exploration we got to have pirate packs from Whitespot on the second last day of school before the break! It was lots of fun and we played Kahoots on Pirates and Vikings. We also had a competition on who could assemble their pirate pack the quickest! I had lots of fun and I won the grand prize in the end, a massive chocolate coin!

Conclusion

I had a lot of fun in this project and I learnt so much about the age of exploration that I know I am going to remember for the rest of my life. I liked working with AR MAKR even if it was a little frustrating at times I still had fun learning about it and working with it. I am sure that I will use this app for many years to come and I can’t wait to make even more story’s with it! This has been one of my most favourites projects yet! I really enjoyed doing it and I even enjoyed the homework!😁

It’s Only The Start!

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Destination Imagination!

After months of working on our pinball machine my team (Griffin, Milaina, Oliver, Cece and Maggie) finally were ready (not really😬) for the DI Regionals Tournament! I bet you’re wondering what Destination Imagination actually IS, well Destination Imagination or DI where schools or just people at home compete in different challenges to win. I was part of the technical team and our challenge was to make a pinball machine! Our pinball machine was 16 feet long and controlled by my teammate Oliver. Our team name is called “The Oversleepers” and we came 3rd! We have qualified for the regionals tournament which we will be showing our pinball machine again, but we will be able to make whatever changes we want to our pinball machine and script. I have done DI before when I was in grade 4 and we won! We won the instant challenge and the actual challenge and so I had some experience going into the competition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Challenge

Our challenge was to make a life size pinball machine that a size 3 soccer ball can go through. We were given a 16 feet by 8 feet playing field for our pinball machine to be displayed in. We had to create a story to go with it and ours was based off Alice in Wonderland.

 

Preparation

Prior to the competition we worked very hard for several weeks creating and building the pinball machine. We worked very hard and built things in Cece’s dad’s workshop and at school. We all decided what characters we were going to be, I was the Queen of Hearts, Oliver was Tweedle Dum, Griffin was Tweedle Dee, Milaina was The Mad Hatter, and Cece was Alice. We worked hard creating and rehearsing our script until we had it memorized fully.

The Competition

On the day of the tournament we had to be at school at 8:30. Our presentation was the first one out all the groups not just ours so it was very nerve wracking being the first group to go! It was pretty good we just need to get more materials to make it better. The presentation had to be 8 minutes and in that time we had to set up our pinball machine and present our whole script.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Forms

Like anything in life we had to fill out a bunch of forms that asked questions about our machine and what we would be showing. Since we were in the technical challenge we had the most forms to fill out (actually engineering had the same amount🤭.) I was in charge of writing all the main information down, but there were also other forms like the expense report and more.  There were 3 pages in the main forms but each one had many questions to fill out.

Rose🌹, Bud🌷, and Thorns🥀

ROSE= Things we did well on

I think that my group did a really good job at communicating and working together. We also did really well on going first because it’s not easy because we had to set the bar and that was really scary! Our team did a good job not giving up even when a round of our pinball machine didn’t work we kept going and didn’t let it crush our courage.

BUD= Things we can improve on

Somethings we can improve on is getting together to work on our pinball machine more often. Everyone is very busy all the time but I feel that we need to skip somethings so we can get together more often and I think that could of made our pinball machine better.

 

THORN= Things we didn’t do well and things we can do better

I think we can defiantly do better at making our pinball machine out of wood and not just making half of it out of cardboard. Cardboard is very flimsy so it didn’t really work for our pinball machine so we defiantly need to make it out of wood next time.

I hope we can learn from our mistakes and do better next time but I am proud of what we did do well and we need to bring that confidence to the next competition!

The instant Challenge

I can’t actually say anything about the Instant challenge until June because it is top secret!🤫 When this is all over in June I will be able to share so make sure you’re checking my blog for my next post about our DI update!

Conclusion

I have learned so much from DI and I am very happy at what we have achieved and I hope that we will do even better in the provincials and I hope that I can continue working with my group over spring break so we can make our pinball machine even better than before! Even though the first competition was very stressful I really enjoyed it and I am really excited for provincials and I hope that we can do our best! 😁

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wish us luck in Provincials!🥳

Having fun with Atoms!

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Our First Science Project!

For our first science project we learned about Atoms! We did many worksheets such as “States of Matter” and “Split Screen Protocol” where we learned about when people discovered the atom and how people discovered what it looked like.

Black box

We did an activity called “the black box” in this activity we were given a small container that was covered with black tape so we couldn’t see inside, we were also not allowed to open the lid. We were given a bunch of materials and then we had to recreate what we thought was in the black box by using are senses to guess what was inside.

How can we communicate our knowledge of atoms in a fun and creative way?

As we went further into learning about atoms our first project was introduced…We had to make a video game!!!😁 This sounded super cool to me and I had lots of ideas for my video game! We had to make our video games about what we had learnt about the atom. The website we used to make our video game is called scratch. Scratch is a website where you can make games and it’s all about coding! When I first opened it I had no idea what to do but now that I have made a game (I made multiple because I couldn’t decide on what to do!) I now know so many things that can help me in the future. I made a trivia game that makes you answer questions on the atom! To check it out click here

Conclusion

Overall I think I did a good job on this project, I really liked how we had to make a video game to showcase our knowledge it made the project so much more fun! I now know many things about atoms and I know how to determine the volume of things and I am now very good at using my senses to determine what is inside objects. I really enjoyed this project and I hope that we can do something like this again!