Carefully walking across a rickety bridge about 10 meters in the air all I could think about was how I’m going to get to the next plank of wood. I gripped onto the only other person who was feeling the same amount of fear. Melissa looked at me with fear but she still smiled. She nodded. Bellow I could hear encouragement from my classmates. I took a deep breath and then stepped.

 

You may think that’s a line from a book or movie or something, but no. That’s an experience that I had when I was doing the high ropes with my friend Melissa in loon lake.

 

Before I start I should probably explain what loon lake is. Loon lake is a retreat. It’s normally used by UBC students or work groups. Our school had hired a group of people called Pinnacle Pursuits. PLP wanted to further bond the PLP 9 class and create a team. Which is something that I’ll write about later.

We started off the trip by getting introduced to the leader of the program that was leading us, Jonoh. He took us to the field on the property. We were introduced to the other leaders. Brandon and ….. We started off with a bit of an icebreaker. We were divided into half and were tasked with recreating certain items with our bodies.

 

 

It was actually really fun and it really introduced us to the next part of our week. We went to our cabins and got all sorted out before we had dinner.

 

Over the next couple days we had a lot of Jonoh sessions where we learned about building a team. We learned that at the moment we were a group not a team. A group is a bunch of people gathered together and a team is a bunch of people who work together and are bonded together. He said that we were well on our way to becoming a team but we would need to listen to him. We were given booklets that had worksheets in them that we would work on over the next week

 

 

The second day we learned a bit about emotional intelligence and how it’s more important than intellectual intelligence. We also talked about our PLP 9 norms. We talked about how they influence us and how we can use them in interacting. 

 

This part of the trip was interesting but some of the best memories were from the activities. We were split into groups called our animal groups. And we were sent to activities depending on our group. I actually really liked my animal group. Our first group activity was rock climbing. I was preettyyy confident in my abilities but then Jack told me that I should do the hardest one. Under the pressure I eventually said yes. Bigggg mistake. I ended up not finishing it. We had lunch and then we did low ropes. 

 

One of things we had been learning about was building a team. We learnt a lot about how to keep our emotions in check and what our strengths were. We did a quiz to figure out our specific type of leader.

 

 

Now what I’d say was one of the most fun parts and the part where I felt most like a team were the team challenges.

 

We were divided into our animal groups and then divided again into groups of four. We were assigned a color (ours was blue) and then we were set off into the challenges.

 

 

The first challenge was some sort of land skiing. We all had to be really coordinated to do this but my group was kinda just trying our best to move. And we ended up getting second place in that challenge!

 

 

There were a couple more challenges and then at dinner the rankings were announced. We all thought that we did poorly but we ended up getting 2nd overall! It was such a fun experience and we really bonded.

 

 

I won’t go into many more fine details because this blog post is already too long.

 

On the last day we were asked to create a goal to carry on something that we learned at loon lake. I decided to make mine about continuing on talking to people that I don’t normally talk to. By the end of loon lake I was sitting with people at lunch that I would have never sat with. Which for me is a step. 

 

We also had to create a mini exhibition for the parents to showcase our learning at loon lake. We were divided into different groups and we were given a section of what we learned. The sections were: clear communication, social awareness, leadership, internal talk and emotional intelligence. 

 

I think that this trip was soooo incredibly helpful with PLP and I’m so happy I got to go. 

 

(Shout out to my bestie Brandon, don’t listen to Jack he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Ur def gonna get Cara! Just ask her for her phone number. Me and the girls are rooting for you.)

 

Bye!

 

 

Turns out being chased by a monster is hard to film.

 

Yeah you read that right. Recently we were given the task of recreating a short horror film called: Run!.

If you watched that you can tell that it’s very professionally made. Us as teenagers with IPhones and no microphones could not make something that good but we definitely tried.

 

We had a week to create the first draft. (Sadly one day was taken away due to a blackout) Me and my group got straight to filming, we scouted our location and created a storyboard. Then we went out to our location to get our filming done. It took about two days to do all the filming and sounds. The last couple days we used for editing. I edited our movie and added all the sounds. I realized too late that the running sounds were out of time and didn’t sound the greatest.

 

This is our finished first draft:

 

After we presented our first draft we had to reflect on how we did and what we could have done better. My group talked about how the location wasn’t realistic and didn’t really work in our favor. We also said that we wanted to try to make our monster scarier.

 

We had about three days to film and edit our second draft. We looked it over and found a new location to film that matched the scenery better. The filming went a lot smoother and we got it done much quicker then last time. I was in charge of editing again so I tried to match the running. It worked at the start…but by the end it didn’t match at all. My group and I didn’t have enough time to film the running audio so it didn’t really link up.

 

With all that done here is our second and final draft:

 

 

I hope you enjoyed watching all the videos! 

 

Bye for now…

I think that the exhibition was an amazing opportunity for me to grow as a learner and as a person. It was actually I really fun experience (even though my legs were killing me by the end) and I had some fun with my friends. In the exhibition I think that I improved with talking to people in a work environment. I say this because, when I was in elementary school I thought that I sucked at presenting. The real reason why I was so bad at it was because I was limiting myself to a script and I could have been so much more confident without one.

I think that my box demonstrated my idea well and I had no trouble trying to explain it to the people. My theme statement was: there is a limit from what you can take from nature before there are consequences. I probably could have put a little more effort in getting prepared for the exhibition but I still think tat I could have run a little more smoothly.

Anyways here’s my box:

Thanks for reading!

Hello! Welcome to another blog post! Today I’ll be righting about a recent maker project.

The theme of the project as developing our photo skills. For the first few classes we just went outside and took photos. Each day we’d have a theme, like:

-Worms eye view

-Birds Eye view

-Landscapes

-Panoramas

Many of these different themes where on the same day so many of the photo’s where similar.

We also did a couple more advanced photo types like: Photo’s from the past

In photo’s from the past we recreated old photo’s or paintings. Me and Kennedy posed as a classic painting by Frida Kahlo. We also got together more friends and then recreated Abby road.

Anyways here it is:

Thanks for reading!

 Hello!

Grab some Halloween candy because this post might be long. Our assignment was to review and reflect some of our maker projects. Some of these projects are:

• Big life journal
• User manual
• Laptop Memoji
• Word pack
• Digital selfie

Big life journal: In the big life journal we learned about tons about how to develop different parts of our learning. One of the things we did was design a YouTube channel.

In this part of the big life journal we learned the different aspect’s of a YouTube channel. We also had to design our first three photos and then we had to list on what we would include in our first video.  We also did a bucket list. We learned about ho to draw in Notability and how to make lists for the future. We also made a dream board. We made the dream board to show what we want to do in the future. So like where we want to travel, what we want do, what we want to have and like relationships in the future. In this project we learned how to make better collages.

I think that I probably could have done a better job of putting effort in to it and maybe written more.

User manual: By far I think that the user manual was the funnest project we’ve done in maker so far. So basically it’s a user manual of ourselves and we talk about ourselves allot. We actually wrote it in third person and we referred to ourselves as a device. I can’t put the whole document but I’ll just put some of my favourite part of the project.

We all went off of a teacher example so a lot of projects are very similar. I think that I did a good job on adding my own flair and my creativity but still sticking to the teacher example. Over all I think that maybe I could have done a better job of making it a little longer but I’m still quite impressed with it. In the project we learned how to develop our writing skills and our creativity.

Laptop Memoji: Other then the user manual the laptop Memojis have been super fun. I loved all the creativity and skills we developed. So hat we had to do for the project was that we had to make a Memoji and then put it in the computer pose, just like this:

So after we did that we had to insert stickers, and using instant alpha we removed the background so it actually looked that we had stickers on the Memoji. We also had to include one sticker that had colour fill with a gradient and one other sticker that includes a picture fill. My laptop Memoji looked like this

We learnt a ton of interesting stuff on Keynote like image fill, instant alpha and colour fill. One thing that I could have done better at would be making the stickers bigger.

Word pack: We made a word pack showing stuff about ourselves. Some of the things that I put in were:

• Kind-of-biologist
• Bird-lover
• Lover-of-sunflowers
• Kind-of-cool-ngl

This is my word pack:

I wish I could have maybe added a little more information.

Digital selfie: we took a selfie and then edited it to show something about ourselves.

In this project we learned how to markup photo’s. I wish that I could have maybe added more markup to make it more interesting.