Jay's World

The Its that time of the year again. It’s the mid-year presentations of learning (mPols) and let me tell you, three years of doing this twice a year, I’m a professional. This year I’m not so stressed about it. We’ve done so much work in the past five months I honestly can’t believe it. So I guess that means its time to reflect.

Humanities

Perks of Being a Wallflower 

I think I’m going to start off with what I’m the proudest of, and that would be in humanities. At the start of the year, we did a book project. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog you would know that I chose the book, Perks of Being a Wallflower. The project we had to complete after reading the book was a group video project.

The reason this is my most proud work is that I can proudly show it to people without cringing or having to leave the room. I genuinely want to show it to people and I love rewatching it. I think my group and I worked really well together. It was difficult at times to find days we were all available to film, but I made it work by creating a schedule of all the times we were available. It really came together in the end and I hope all of you have had a chance to see it. If not you should watch it because I am super proud of it.

Science 

How did I F.A.I.L this year?

The project I’m the least proud of was my DNA twins project. This was a partner project however everything I say is what I learned and how I failed. Throughout the project, I was never really understanding the learning we did. I struggled a lot trying to grasp the topic. I tried my best to teach myself more or re-read notes from class but I still never had the knowledge to properly create a project. So that’s what led to the video being a flop, in my opinion.

Math 

As the years go on, the math we are learning becomes more enjoyable for me. Maybe this is because we are starting to use fewer numbers! That’s why I really enjoy algebra, which I believe showed in my board game project. This project didn’t just meet my standards – it actually exceeded them! Not only did I have an amazing partner, shout out to Emily, but I also had a really good understanding of the topic before we started. I was pleased with the results of this project because I was able to demonstrate my learning by using the information acquired in a new context. Sometimes I find it difficult to create an interesting project when I don’t have enough prior knowledge.

That’s one of the things I find the most frustrating about PLP work. This happens mostly in math and science because it so content heavy. While Scimatics aims to follow the same inquiry-based model as other PLP classes, it sometimes fails in that we require more direct instruction of content. Without deep background knowledge, it is hard to know where to begin.

Maker 

This year in Maker we used a lot of skills and learned a lot of new ones. We practiced a bunch of different video skills like documenting a live event, recreating videos shot by shot and making music for videos. These projects really added to my tool belt of skills.

For the recreation video, we had to recreate a given video as perfect as possible. This was a group project and we made two videos. The projects taught us a lot of new skills and let us use the ones we already knew like camera angles, editing and music making. My group and I worked really well together and that always adds to the video. You can usually tell when a group didn’t want to work together.

Group Work

T his year has been a great year of group projects for me. Having worked with the same classmates for three years I’m comfortable working with every one of them. I’ve learned a lot about my classmate’s strengths along with my own. When it comes to group work I am a good leader. This was shown well in my Perks of Being a Wallflower project, I was a really good time manager and ideator and I was a good bridge of communication between Emily and Marshall. Organizing the exhibition this year was also a place I showed my leadership skills, I don’t have direct proof of that except that when reflecting in class some of my classmates said I was a good leader.

PGP

PGP or Personal Growth Plan has been going really well for me. Im still getting used to it but I am noticing a big change in my work habits. I’ve started time blocking and I’ve noticed how much time there is in a day to get work done. I can’t say I’ve been a perfect time blocker but I’m still getting used to it. I really do think it’s helping though. 

The Book

As most of you may know we are currently reading a book called What Do You Really Want? Its filled with exercises to help you develop and reach your goals. I thought the book was going to be boring and tedious but im actually enjoying it. I really like writing in my journal. It’s very a satisfying seeing a book fill up with words.

How can I get a more creative experience out of my highschool career?

In Conclusion

Well, I think that brings us to the end of my mid-year reflection. This year has been amazing so far, in ways I haven’t even mentioned and im looking forward to what’s next.

As always, thanks for checking in, I’m still in school.

Jessie

What does it take to change the world? Power? Money? Well, those things may help it actually takes a crazy person to change the world. You have to be the type of person to go against the grain and show people what you believe in.

Our new unit in humanities is called Cray Cray Yay! Yay!  In this unit, we are brainstorming the idea of being crazy. We were told to make a three minute Pecha Kucha on someone from the Think Different campaign made by Apple in 1997. I chose Charlie Chaplin because I love the film industry and he had a great influence on it.

A Pecha Kucha is a slideshow that auto plays. It usually has twenty slides shown twenty seconds each but since we are a big class and pressed for time we cut out presentations down to three minutes each. This gave us nine slides at twenty seconds each.

What you saw above was the slides from my keynote. Here is a link to my research. I wouldn’t want you to leave here without having learned something!

We started by researching our person. Then once we had all our research we formed a thesis. The thesis, in this case, was used as our concluding sentence. I really enjoyed this project. It was low stress and I enjoyed writing and researching Chaplin. Writing the script and researching was the most difficult part, though even that wasn’t that hard. Once the research was done I gathered some images that fit with what I was talking about and put them into a keynote.

I really liked this style of presentation. It kept you on your toes when presenting. I felt that we had more of a choice with who we were going to research. I got to pick someone I was genuinely interested in learning about. I think that made this project super easy and fun to make.

As always thanks for checking in, im still in school.

Jessie

A blog without pictures would be pretty boring, wouldn’t it? But you gotta be careful when you add images to your posts because you might not have permission to use it. You could use a plugin like Pixabay to add photos like this;

This photo already gives credit to the creator and shows you where it is from. But what’s even better then this is creating your own images. It’s useful and creative. Some people would argue that they can’t do that cause they “can’t draw” or the “aren’t good at art”. But there so many tools out in the world that can help you create images.

For example, I use Adobe Photoshop, that’s a pretty advanced tool and it isn’t available but there are loads of other tools out there. For this post, I had to create an image of my own, but I didn’t really have any ideas. I started playing around with photoshop, and this is what I ended up with.

So, im not really sure what happened but I know that if I showed this to my friends they would laugh. So im not complaining. I hope you also enjoy my random image generated from my brain.

Thanks for checking in im still in school.

Jessie

What’s up folks, welcome back!

Have you ever seen the film The Disaster artist? The movie about the creation of The room, by Tommy Wiseau. 

The one staring the Franco brothers, Dave and James. Oh and apparently the other brother Tom who I didn’t even know existed until I googled how to spell their name. Sorry Tom Franco… Anyway, at the end of the film (spoiler free) they show a side by side of their perfect recreations of scenes from the film. It is absolutely amazing how accurate it was. 

This leads me to our latest project. In small groups of three to four people we had to recreate two videos. One the teacher chose and the other our group chose. Here are the original videos we recreated.

This one is the one our teacher chose.

This is the one my group and I chose.

The recreation process was a good challenge. Some parts of the task were difficult but others were quite simple. For example we didn’t have to come up with our own shots or a storyboard because the original video already did all of that. However some of the difficult parts were finding matching costumes and exact props. My group struggled with set pieces and finding a time when we could all film but I think we did pretty good considering the time we had. Now for your viewing pleasure here are the two videos my group and I recreated.

 

I really enjoyed this project and I think it would be fun to do it again. I can really see the potential this challenge has with all the things we’ve learned and I think with more time we could make absolutely perfect recreations.

Thanks for checking in,

Jessie

Let’s get Riel, Louis Riel! Ten out of ten play on word. Do you know who Louis Riel is? Well, when I started this unit I had no clue who he was. But now I am an expert on Louis Riel and I’m here to teach you about him by showing you the projects I did.

We had two main projects during this unit. We had to read Chester Brown’s Louis Riel comic summary and we had to make a power animation.

Louis Riel

The Louis Riel comic book was the story of his life and the legacy he left. It was a super interesting read. I liked that it was a comic because it was easy to read. It was surprisingly informational for a comic as well.

While we were reading the comic we had to write chapter summaries. These chapter summaries were most of the time a short couple of paragraph that had to answer these topics;

– What were the key events that happened in this section?

– What characters appeared in this section?

– How is Louis Riel portrayed in this section?

– Who holds power in this section?

We did do one summary that was a creative summary. We had to create a keynote magic move which is kind of like animation. This was a practice for our final project.

I suggest reading the book it’s very good but if you are planning to read it and don’t want any spoilers maybe don’t watch the video. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

After we finished the book I had a new knowledge of the length the colonist went through to get what they wanted. I also learned more about the Metis and the land they were fighting for.

For our final reflection, we had to write about whether we thought Louis Riel was a hero or a villain. In my opinion, I don’t think he was a hero or a villain. I do think he helped the metis a lot and created a lot of change for them. But he also went insane and was the cause of a lot of deaths. I think there could have been less violent ways to solve these problems and don’t think he handled it correctly.

The CPR

After learning about Louis Riel we moved onto the CPR. We learned a lot about the CPR during our trip to Calgary and you can check out my blog post on that!

We did a lot of cool lessons on the subject of the CPR. For example, we did a lesson called “From Sea to Shining Sea”. It was a series of question we had to answer but the answers were scattered around the room. It was really interesting because you are forced to move around and read little articles with the answers inside them.

We also watched a slide deck called “CPR the whole story”. I enjoyed it because it was simple but still full of information. I learned a lot from that lesson.

This part is not really following the timeline of the projects but since it’s under the CPR category I’ll talk about it now. On one of the last days of school, we started a movie called Iron Road.

It was really cool but very Hollywood. It was a nice way to end the school year. It also had an actor I like name Sam Neill who plays in a tv show I enjoy so that was cool to see some of the stuff he does. One of the main characters named James who was played by Luke Macfarlane reminded me of Nick Jonas for some reason as well.

I don’t know if you see it but I do so…

Numbered Treaties

The Numbered Treaties were a series of eleven treaties signed the by Aboriginal peoples in Canada and the government of Canada.

We did a really cool exercise where we had to take facts about treaty 6 and write a story paragraph about it.

This was the info we were given and were had a certain amount of time to write it. I cant remember the exact time but it was probably 10-15 min.

Here is my short story. I really enjoyed this exercise because it tested what you could write in a short amount of time. I love creative writing and this mixed both facts and creative writing!

Gold, Gold, Gold!

Our of all our lessons this one was the shortest. It was getting closer to the end of the year and we had to fit this into a couple of weeks. Learning about the goldrush was really interesting.

The gold rush caused the first voluntary large-scale world migration. People from Europe, Asia, and the Americas came for a chance at fortune and a new life!

As great as the gold rush seemed it was also an opportunity for greed, fraud, racism, and violence.

The Cariboo Gold Rush

Gold was discovered in 1857 along the Fraser and Thompson setting off a gold rush that brought over 30,000 people to British Columbia.

This didn’t just bring miners to BC. It also brought entrepreneurs that would set up shops. Soon small towns popped with general supply stores and saloons with dancing girls and other services. Before the year was over the colony of British Columbia had been formed.

Hurdy Gurdy Girls

When we were learning about the gold rush we briefly read about a group of people called the hurdy-gurdy girls. This was such an interesting and funny topic to me that I did a little more research.

Barkerville Saloon already had women entertainment but in the summer of 1865, an organized group of dance partners from San Fransisco called the Hurdy-Gurdy Girls arrived complete with their own band. This caused a lot of excitement for the male miners in the town.

The hurdy-gurdy girl we female dance partners. For a dollar, a dance the man would lift his partner repeatedly as high as he could off the floor, at the same time swinging her feet aloft.

So if you a popular dance partner you’d be making a pretty good amount of money a night.

I found this topic really interesting for some reason but it led me to do more research on them. I also found the song they would dance to called “Bonnie are the hurdies, O” and it seems pretty cool.

The Project

Im sure you are thinking “When is she gonna talk about the project?” well you are in luck because im gonna talk about it right now.

So we had to make a “Power Animation”. But what is a power animation? Well, we got to choose a person that influenced Canada around the 1800s in some way and create an animation about the power they held.

The person I chose was James Douglas and the Douglas Treaties. Usually, I would give backstory on the subject but the goal of our animations was to do that. So instead I’ll show you the animation because if you don’t get a good understanding of the topic from my video then it wasn’t done properly.

However I”m proud of it so I think you will learn a lot!

The Prosses

Making this animation was a long process we didn’t just jump into the animating. First, we had to research our topic because when I went into this project I knew nothing about the topic. We had to hand in a research paper in note form. This was really helpful because it takes all the information and puts it into one place making it easier to write the story. After we had the story written out we had to make the storyboard.

I drew my storyboard in Keynote. There was an update that allows you to draw in it now and that allowed me to flip from storyboard to storyboard using the slides.

Writing a storyboard is super helpful because it guides you write animating or filming. Even if you don’t always follow it exactly it is still there to help. I know that I didn’t always follow my storyboard because I might have come up with a better idea or changed the story a bit.

Time to Animate!

After we finished the research and storyboarding I started to animate. This was a long process that took we about two weeks and maybe 15-25 hours. Then I did the voice over and added music. In class, we had a viewing party and I got a super good reaction from my class.

This whole unit has been super interesting and very self-driven and I enjoyed it. Im super proud of my animation and hope I get to share it with lots of people. This is my last blog post from grade nine so until next time everyone!

– Jessie🌈