Humanities

Argh Matey Blog Reflection.

faiths Humanities

 Hi. This blog post is an end of project reflection on a project called Argh Matey! This project was all about the European exploration of the new world! During this project we had to learn about Christopher Columbus with his “discovery” of the Americans, we had to learn about the Columbus exchange, and much much more. In this project we learned about cause and consequences, both the cause and consequences part of the project and the European exploration part were put together to create the end project.   

Before I tell you about the end project I need to explain how we used an app called AR Makr to put together the end project. This app is an augmented realty (AR) app this makes it so you can add 3D or 2D shapes to a room to make it look like it is actually there when you look at it in the app. 

Now combining the three things I have talked about, I made an AR video on the European exploration using cause and consequence! I made a cause and consequence sheet on the European exploration, created drawings for each event, wrote an paragraph explanation, and then I added it all into the AR Makr app to bring it all alive. For example, I brought a boat from Christopher Columbus’s time and also some indigenous people. This showed the Columbian exchange and the start of European exploration of the Americas.

 I enjoyed making the end project even if there were a few problems like the AR app not saving my progress, or the fact that my writing explanation took forever to record. Over all I enjoyed how we put our learning about the European exploration into a new app.  I hope you enjoyed learning about the Argh matey project.

My first experience with DI

faiths Humanities ,

Hi for the past few weeks i’ve been working on a project that has been both fun and stressful, this project was called destination imagination(DI). For this project we were put into groups and in those groups we tried to find the solution to the problem assigned to our group. We filled out a survey saying what group we would and wouldn’t want to be in. The groups we could be in were….

-engineering: where the problem we had to solve used engineering 

-technological: where the problem we had to solve used technological thinking 

-scientific: where the problem we had to solve used scientific thinking 

  • fine arts: where the problem we had to solve used fine arts 

The group I said I wanted to be in was engineering and I got what I wanted. I was put into one of the two PLP 8 engineering teams. There was two engineering teams one with each of the humanities teachers. You might want to check out some of my teammates blog posts for DI:

Ines

 

Alfie

Samuel

Gwen: http://www.blog44.ca/gwenl

max: http://www.blog44.ca/maxl

Mateo: http://www.blog44.ca/Mateok

 

For our solution we had to build a model of a building showing how opposites can be complementary. We had to include one visual art style and one architectural style. We chose to do Renaissance and post modernism for those. We also had to include 2 style features and two visual art styles. 

 

Our visual art styles were the roof and the shape of the building as it represented post modernism and our style features were the Renaissance themed furniture and paint. Along with all of that we had to come up with a story around the model of the building to again show  how opposites can be complementary. Then we were to hand in the video showing our solution. For the skit we chose to act as people of all ages from an old grumpy person to a youngster and we even had a millennial. We did this to as another way to show how opposites can be complementary. Here is our video!

Even thou I know that this video isn’t as good a it should have been I know that I definitely learned a lot during this project. I learned that it is very hard to work together as a group on projects like this. I learned that DI takes a lot more patience then I first thought, and that time management is more important than you might think.  Lastly I also learned that DI takes up a lot of time and a lot of thought. Overall this project was very interesting! 

Final blogging challenge!

faiths Humanities ,

For my final blogging challenge post for this year I had complete two tasks. 

The first task was to write a reflection on my participation in the challenge and to think about the past 10 days that I have written post. To do this I answered multiple questions here the one of the questions. 

Which post did you enjoy writing the most and why?

I enjoyed writing the 😃emoji story post 👍the most because it was a very creative way to practice writing stories and I got to see new and exciting emojis that I had never seen before. 

By answering these questions I was able to reflect on all the interesting work that I have done these last few weeks. 

The second task was to write about my blogging plans for the future. My plans are very simple I will continue to write in my blog as the school year goes on. I will reflect on each project that I do next quarter in scimatics. If I were to add to the blog in a personal way I would add videos of me reviewing my favourite books. I would also write about my family adventures. Lastly I would include more photos in my future posts. 

This concludes my very last 2021 blogging challenge post. I really enjoyed learning all these new ways to blog, I hope you enjoyed it too. 

Celebrations and festivities

faiths Humanities , ,

Hello today I am doing another blogging challenge. This weeks blogging challenge is about festivities and celebrations. For this I had to write about one celebration/festivity and explain a photo that I thought best showed one of my festivities/celebration.

Family celebration 

Christmas Eve: Christmas Eve is the day before Christmas and my family has special traditions that we do every year. For the first tradition we go to the church service at 4 o’clock as a family. We also have a Fondue supper every Christmas Eve. We have chocolate fondue caramel fondue we have bread with great cheese sauce and we all enjoy it as a family. Next we all open up our secret Santa gifts. Every year Everyone pulls a family members name out of a hat then you have to buy a gift for that person secret Santa. The last tradition that we have on Christmas Eve is we all take her mattress down and sleep in the living room all together we usually have a terrible sleep but it’s still fun. The last tradition that I just mentioned only happens once every two years because on the other year we are visiting our family in Alberta so we don’t get to sleep in our living room but instead we get to see our aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents so I think it’s a fair trade. Those are the fun traditions that my family has and I enjoy every single one of them.

 

A fireplace 

I chose this object because I think it is one of the best objects that represents my Christmas. For me a fire place doesn’t only remind me of  warmth, but it also reminds me of Christmas. Every year on Christmas (here or in Alberta) we open our secret Santa gifts on Christmas Eve and our family gifts on Christmas Day. We open our gifts in our living room and in our living room there is a fireplace that we always turn on.  A fire place also reminds me of Christmas because every year when all of my family comes into the living room to decorate our tree we turn on Christmas music and we turn on the fireplace. A lot of my best memories from Christmas is when we are by my fireplace as a family having fun and that is the reason that I chose a fireplace. 

That ends my festivities/celebration blog post I hope you enjoyed reading it!

  “How it started how its going” project reflection.

faiths Humanities ,

Hi this is my  “how it started how its going” project reflection. This project took about four weeks and the driving question was “what can we learn from the past and why does that matter today?” Like most of my other projects there were 6 milestones that we had to do so we could answer the driving question and make the final project. 

The final project was a “how it started and how’s it going” meme. On one side of the meme there was a medieval or Renaissance painting that connected to my assigned worldview aspect. The other side of the meme was a modified version of the first painting to show how the aspect has changed or stayed the same today. My aspect was on the topic of beliefs and how beliefs bring people together. After we had to make a virtual  museum exhibit so other people could see our memes. Then we had to present our virtual exhibit in a zoom meeting with our parent and teachers watching.

To start the project we had to learn the definition of worldview and say what my own  worldview was. I found this one of the more difficult parts of the project. I didn’t really know what my worldview was. After I identified my own worldview, we did milestone 2. For this milestone I had to take five main events from my life that has shaped my worldview and make it into a collage. This collage was based off of two curricular competencies. The first one was empowered learner where I had to use technology to help improve my learning. In my case, I had to learn how to put photos into keynote and how to draw photos to add to the collage. For the second competency, I had to show how I can respond to text. I showed this when I wrote my paragraph with the collage. I got a ☀️ for this milestone. 

The next important milestone was milestone 5. For this milestone, I had to create my final meme. In order to do this milestone, I had learn how to use a lot of different photo editing apps. One of these apps is SuperimposeX. In this app, I photo edited my own family into my Renaissance meme! The painting that I chose for the how it started side of my art, is called “Flight into Egypt”. It is based on the story of how Joseph was warned in a dream to take Mary and Jesus to Egypt because Herod was going to kill all the baby boys. This connected to my aspects of beliefs as it showed that their belief in Christianity brought the people in the Renaissance closer together. This showed the establishing historical significance curricular competency. 

The “how it’s going” side of my art showed beliefs bring people together even today. I replaced Mary and Joseph with my Mom and Dad. I also add the rest of my family members around baby Jesus to show that our belief in Christianity brings us closer together. I am proud of some of the other details I added that people believe in and that can bring them closer together.  For example, one of the not very obvious details I added is the set of hands in the top left corner. These hands show that people’s beliefs in social justice like equal rights can be powerful. Way in the far background I put the Canada place and the Vancouver skyline. Being a Canadian means we believe in a free country where everyone has rights. So where you live can affect what you believe in. This final project used all the curricular competencies we had been working on during the 4 weeks.

The last part of this project, other than this fabulous blogpost, was the LAUNCH of our virtual museum. Each role group created a script so we could present on a ZOOM meeting with parents and teachers. I was a DRI. The directly responsible individual for the beliefs group. I found creating the script with the other DRI’s challenging because all of us like control. We are the bossy people. At the ZOOM meeting I found it challenging to speak to the computer instead of to a regular audience. I loved the launch because it was a way to do an exhibition during COVID. I remember going to Sam’s exhibitions and seeing the everybody with their own creative project. The museum that was out together by my class and teachers was a very creative way of doing a project. Each room was different and each room had their own object that matched their worldview aspect. The guided tour was amazing because it showed you everybody’s art in every room with a click of a button. I also liked how I could see the ghosts of the people visiting the museum. The virtual museum because my grandparents could see my work too. 

So back to the driving question!! “ What can we learn from the past and why does it matter today?” The first thing that I noticed is that every room in the museum showed how history matters today. All rooms showed that the same aspects areimportant today as they were in the past. But we represented them in different ways. For example, my room showed how beliefs are still important to people today. The crusades were terrible. It was a very bloody war. Learning about the crusades can help people with religious beliefs not make the same mistakes. My family is Christian and we don’t think that the Christians in the crusades were doing what the Bible says about living our faith.

People can value beliefs but change how it looks and learn from the past. If we don’t learn from the past then we repeat the same mistakes.

Overall I think my class showed a great understanding of the different aspects of worldview from the Renaissance and medieval times to today. Personally, I am most proud of the 5th milestone. Even though there were times I was super stressed and didn’t think we could get it done in time, this was a very interesting project that came together in the end. I would like to say sorry to our teachers because we may have shortened their lifespan because of this project.                        

😁Emoji Story👍

faiths Humanities

Hi. Today I had a very fun challenge where we had to make a story only using emojis that are computer generated.  Here are the emojis and the story I made to go with them.

Emoji story

Once upon a time

There was an amazing 🍩 donut shop. That sold by far the best donuts in the whole town, the whole province, maybe even in the whole world  

Every day 

A man named Lincon would come and buy a dozen plain chocolate covered donuts with rainbow sprinkles. Then he would go to his boring day job that he hated. Even though he hated his day job he loved his night job as a magician though he could never figure out how to pull something out of his hat on the first try. 

One day 

He was doing a magic act beside a small pond. He was trying to pull his favourite food  a 🍗 chicken leg out of his hat. After a few embarrassing tries he finally pulled it out of his hat. Suddenly a frog jumped out of the bushes and took his chicken leg.

 

Because of that

 the man chased the frog 🐸 around the field trying to get his food back. Then the man tripped on a log and fell face  first into the mud 

Then 

Because the man fell on his face he cried😭 in pain and he cried because his magic show was ruined. The frog felt so bad because he knew it was all his fault. He wanted to do something to make up for it. He got a great idea

From that day on

Instead of a chicken leg the man would pull a frog out of the hat 🎩 . It worked every time!

There it is my emoji story. I know it is unrealistic but that is the story I came up with from those emojis. 

I had a lot of fun writing this story/ trying to come up with it I hope you had just as fun reading it. Bye 👋 

Music.

faiths Humanities

Fun facts ( and a quiz) about music!

Welcome to my music post where I will tell you about an instrument, tell you about a music writer/musician, and then you could try the music quiz I made. 

First I will tell you about the instrument I used to play in grade 6 and 7 the clarinet. Even though I no longer play it I still wanted to know more about it, so I researched the clarinet and here is some of the things I found.

  1. The clarinet was invented sometime after 1698 by Johann Christoph Denner. 
  2. The clarinet is the most popular single reed instrument.
  3. Over ten types of clarinets
  4. Made from Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene or ABS
  5. Most famous clarinettist include Anton stadler (1753-1812)
  6. You need a reed to make a sound on it
  7. A clarinet  doesn’t break easily 
  8. For all ages
  9. You can play many types of music on your clarinet one type is modern music. 
  10. To help someone learn more about how to play a clarinet I am putting this YouTube video of the first three steps here

 

Now that you know a lot about the clarinet lets learn about a great musician who I am sure you all have heard about Ludwig van Beethoven. He was a great songwriter and musician that lived from 1770-1827. He was born in Germany and his work ranked amongst most preformed of the classical music. He wrote nine symphonies, and the fifth symphony is the most famous symphony. He started to wright a 10th symphony before he died though he was never able to finish it. 

Finally for this post I made a music Kahoot that you can try. Post a comment below to let me know what you thought about it.

That concludes my music post. I learned more about music today so I really hope you learned a little from reading this too.  

Final reflection on medium is the message project

faiths Humanities ,

 

This project was all about advertisements and what they mean.  What you see above this is our final project our DCM ad. Myself and the other learners have been working really hard on creating this ad but we can talk about that later right now i am going to tell you about our driving question.

 Our driving question is “How does what we hear read and see effect us”, this is the question all of the PLP 8 learners have been trying to answer for the whole project, and I think I have an idea of the answer.  I think it can influence us in many many different ways. One example is that it can change our opinion on things, like if you see a celebrity saying that a brand is bad and before you watched that ad you might’ve thought it was great but hearing somebody big and powerful who you trust saying it’s bad might make you think they’re right. What we hear see and read can influence us also by changing the amount of stuff that we buy they can make a spend much more money by making products seem more appealing. They can also change how we are as a person by changing will be surround ourselves with. 

now how did i get to that conclusion, well i got to it by the many steps that we did in this project and I am going to tell you about a few of them now. 

Milestone 1 this is the milestone that got it all started without it i wouldn’t be able to tell the message of an ad or find the target audience very well. In this milestone we had to write a paragraph saying what the message and target audience was of an advertisement called welcome home. 

The next important part of the project was a worksheet to have us practised finding the message of an ad. This was the advertising survey. This helped me understand how to find the message in an advertisement. 

The next very important part of this project is milestone 4 the team launch journal. 

This journal we’ve been working on for the whole project.  It was the one we worked with in our advertisement group when we were thinking and creating our advertisement drafts. This was part of the project where my group had difficulties working as a team because we all have different opinions and it was hard to listen to other peoples’. I think this was a very important part  because it was one of the first times i work in a group in grade 8. I have not gotten a mark on this yet.

Next was milestone 6 the most important part of the project it was our final team advertisement. My group had to make an advertisement for Deep Cove Music and we finish just a few days ago. This was probably my favourite part of the project I loved creating the different advertisement drafts, you can see a couple of my individual and group draft below.  Without this advertisement I wouldn’t fully understand how much work goes into creating one and how we must think about the target audience. 

Here are some of my individual and group drafts. 

Individual drafts

Group drafts

Those are all the steps that most helped me to answer the driving question. I enjoyed this project and I love learning about media, message and how to answer the driving question.

I hope to do another project soon.

The medium is the message project reflection

faiths Humanities , , ,

This project was all about advertisements and media. The big question we are trying to answer is how does the things we see, hear, and read influence us. And even though we haven’t really got to fully answer that question we have done many other things. To start we did the launch activities but sadly i was away the first three days of this  project so i can’t really tell you what happened though i know for a fact that they did some similar thing that we did on the last project for example they put what they needed to know on  sticky notes and what they already knew on different sticky notes just like what we did on the last project. 

The 1 milestone I also away for though i still did it, only a few days later.  For this milestone we had to write a paragraph about an apple advertisement called Welcome Home.  For this paragraph i had to describe what the message was and how they got that across along with who it was for. I believe I did well on this one.  I earned a sun emoji. I enjoyed watching the advertisement.

The next main activity was Milestone 2. For this milestone, we wrote another paragraph, but this time it was on a historical piece of media. In this paragraph we had to answer the five key questions along with explaining what I thought the message was, who the target audience was, and who made the advertisement. I also earned a sun emoji on it.  I wish I had written down the five answers because I voice recorded my answers. Because of this the teachers could not see it and thought I did not do it! At the same time, voice recording saves me a lot of time.  Now I know how to make it so the teachers can see it.

The last milestone that we have done so far is Milestone 3. In this milestone we also had to choose a piece of historical media.  This time the piece of media had to be an advertisement. In order to write a paragraph on this advertisement we had to learn about the techniques and appeals that people use when they make advertisements. We did that in class. In our paragraph we needed to write about two to three techniques and appeals that the ad uses to catch people’s attention.

All of these milestones were leading towards the end product which was creating an advertisement for a Deep Cove Business. My group chose DCM as our business to do the ad on. In order to be able to create an ad fro them we had to do an interview with them. This is where we ran into our first problem!!

DCM did not answer our calls.  The person we needed to talk to did not contact us and seemed to be away.

One week later, we finally visited their business in person.  We did the interview. In this interview we asked Brandon an employee there, 5 questions about DCM and what we think the ad should look like.

The next day we reflected on the information and started our own individual drafts.  For my first draft, I looked at their past advertisements and tried to make mine based on what they liked before. I will say that I didn’t love my first draft. It didn’t;t seem to fit the DCM theme but as I did different drafts I got better and understood more about what I had to do. 

 

After every draft we created our group would have time to critique each other’s. They always said that it was too colourful and didn’t fit their past advertisements. I changed mine from portrait to landscape and adjusted the colour. I liked mine but it was different from the rest of my group.

One of the main problems that my group faced was when my group had to do our first group draft. Most of the boys in my group wanted to do their own thing and didn’t’t want to listen to other people’s ideas.  A few of them didn’t listen to the teacher’s instructions. Because of this, it took a long time to finish our first group draft. I did not think we would get them done in time. My group said I was too bossy and I sorta agree…I can be bossy. HOWEVER, I do believe that they needed to pay attention a little more so they wouldn’t keep asking me what we were doing when the teacher had just explain it i minute ago. Our first group drafts looked like this.

          

Right now, we are working on our latest group draft.  It is due tomorrow morning. We plan to meet before school to make sure can finish it on time.

User Manuel Project review

faiths Humanities ,

The first PLP 8 project of the year was driven by this question: how do I creatively communicate who I am? The main way was by creating a user manual. No…it was NOT a user manual for our iPads but actually was a user manual about us! To do this we would complete six milestones.

For the user manual project we first had to start by building knowledge about ourselves.  This meant figuring out what we knew, what we needed to know, and how to find out how to get that information. First we wrote what we already knew about ourselves and then we wrote what we thought we would need to know about ourselves and the apps on the iPad.  Finally we wrote down ways we could get this information. 

Through my group discussions I realized that I knew what I liked and what I disliked.  I knew what some of my troubles were and a lot of the things that make me unique.  For  example I am picky with food and sometimes talk in random accents for no reason. I knew how to use the camera, iMessages, and how to make an memoji, which was very helpful information to know.

I needed to know how to use the iPad apps more so I could creatively communicate who I am in different ways. 

To find the missing information I needed to be willing to ask people around me like classmates, teachers, and family…not my Mom for computer stuff. This is difficult for me because I do not know these people well(teachers,and students, I know my Family).  I am shy when talking to other people and I do not like talking in front of people who do not know me.  Mr. Hughes and Ms. Maxwell helped us explore the apps and I also did some exploration on my own.  The main apps that we explored were pages, keynote, notes, photo, and things. 

The next step was to see the user manuals that the teachers wrote about themselves. I loved learning about my teacher’s personalities and who they are after 3:00! Seeing the manuals gave me the idea of what we would create in the next few days. We then started to write down words to describe ourselves. For example if we were a daughter or friend or dog lover or cat hater we wrote that down. 

For our fourth milestone, we needed to use the Memoji laptop sticker we had made a few classes before. The Memoji laptop had stickers we customized to show a little bit about who we  are. The fourth milestones meant getting critique on that Memoji sticker and being able to reflect and create something better. First we got student critique and  I only had two sticky notes on my laptop Memoji the first round and 1 sticky note the second round. I was not sure how to move forward because of the critique wasn’t super helpful. 

The fifth milestone was all about the revising and getting critique on the user manual. We had the rough draft. I loved writing the rough draft of the user manual. I had a lot of ideas and found it fun.  The critique itself I found it hard to do. I got much better critique on this part. I don’t love giving critique and find it hard to tell people how they could improve. I also did not have enough time to read through their whole manual.

The sixth and final milestone was about presenting the project. For this we were supposed to stand in front of two classmates and read them some of our user manual and show them our laptop stickers. I believe that I did ok. I should have looked at the audience more and prepared what I was going to say a bit more.  I loved hearing more  about people and their likes, dislikes, and warnings about them. 

Overall I think I loved the project and think I did well on the project although there are a few things I could improve. I believe I answered the question I creatively communicated who I was in not one but in TWO ways…the user manual and the lap top sticker. I would have improved my layout for my Memoji laptop stickers. There were some things I wanted to make better but could not quite put my finger on them. For my user manual I had trouble with the trouble shooting. It was hard to get the main idea for that section.  Overall I hope that through PLP I will get more comfortable and better at presenting my ideas in front of others. It is a good life skill. Finally, I believe that through this project i improved in several ways making it so I can create the project you see below.

My user Guide