Julia’s Journey

A guide to my learning

Month: March 2025

Destination Imagination Regionals

By

On March 12, 2025

In Maker

And just like that it’s Destination Imagination time again…

Challenge

This year I was assigned to the Engineering high wire act. I was in a group with Gemma, Esther,  James, and Quin. I thought we worked exceptionally well together, and our final performance was a success. 

Preparing

Within the weeks leading up to the tournament, our group had a ton of fun writing the script, getting costumes together, and rehearsing. 

We started off with our script, making it funny, relatable, and easy to follow. I think our script is one of the best things about our performance. We worked really hard on all of the pieces to our presentation, especially the props. They really add to the overall effect when the story comes together.

How We Created Our Story

Hire Wire Act

That was the name of our challenge this year, the engineering one. We were tasked to create a transporter that moves along the tournament provided cord to complete weight(s) transport. We also had to tell a story in the form of contemporary circus. A daring display, and an ensemble spectacle also had to be present in the performance. 

At the very start of our DI journey, we still had everything to do. One class, Gemma was singing a Greatest Showman song, and our story sparked from there. We re-watched parts of the Greatest Showman and crafted our script by taking existing parts as well as incorporating our own ideas into our take on the ‘Greatest Showman’

Our performance told the story of 2 young boys on the lookout for adventure. When they get in trouble and find themselves in an orphanage, they escape to create a circus!

After provincials I will give our story in more detail.

I was really proud of our group, especially because of the props we built, as I said before. I found our group worked well together, especially because everyone pitched in and brought something different to the group. This years DI went a lot smoother than last year because I had done it before and I felt more confident. 

Team Reflection

Our whole group thought our performance went well, and all that was left to do was continue our success into provincials! Our one thing we want to improve on is to not have a bunch of time left over after we present, because we were just waiting for our machine to finish its rounds after we finished. It was a bit awkward but not the end of the world!

Reflecting Back On Last Year

In grade 8, I felt our group wasn’t ready on DI day. We weren’t really prepared, and everything was quite last minute. This year, we had our lines memorized, props built and everything done on time. I’m really proud of our final product, and I hope we continue until provicials!

Thanks for reading, be ready for provincials coming soon!

Mid – Term Presentation of Learning 📚

By

On March 5, 2025

In Uncategorized

Welcome to my Mpol 2025!

Ms. Kadi, this is my Mom, Katie. 

Pol Declaration

“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 that I can use to improve as a learner.”

As I begin to look back on this year, I realize it has been quite a journey. Coming into my second year of high school I had some big expectations for myself. I wanted to achieve all my goals and have a successful year. “Failure is success in progress.” – Albert Einstein. Lets rewind to September and retell my learning story.

VMV’s

I chose 3 success behaviours to focus on at the beginning of the year, agency, self regulation, and communication and collaboration. 

Agency

  • Own up to my mistakes in front of a group
  • Learn to accept constructive criticism in a more positive way
  •  Set achievable goals

Self – Regulation

  • Balance my sports and school by only taking the amount of time needed to complete the assignment
  • Attend tutorial time to be in a focused learning space
  • Finish work before due date, not being stressed is a priority

Communication and Collaboration

  • Communicate with teachers if needed, help is okay
  • Support peers by critiquing their work when asked
  • Group work is challenging, share the work between everyone

Reflecting back upon my Vision, Mission, and Values, I think I have really opened up and adapted my style of working in a classroom this year to work with my VMV. I know that I will never be a perfect learner and I will always have flaws, but taking these steps and following my VMV has helped me become a better peer, student, and person. 

Maker

Everything we have done in maker this year has been fun, engaging and interesting. My favourite project of all has to be Unboxing Me, which we are currently still contributing to. This has opened me up and exposed me to real goal setting and learning who I am as a person. We launched the project by starting to read the book called ‘What do you really want?’ Every chapter we were to complete an activity, but you could choose if you wanted to do extra. I have bullet journaled for a few years now, and it really helps me pour out my feelings onto paper. So when we launched ‘Unboxing Me’ I knew I would love it. 

Science

Lately, Science has been quite enjoyable for me. Everything we have learned has made sense to me, and really taught me to take a step back and look at the world from a different point of view. For instance, our ‘Watt the Heck!?’ Project really Opened up my eyes about electricity. We completed an energy infographic, I selected Hydropower, and as I researched all about it, I figured out it is sustainable, and it does affect our environment. It helps save energy and is a sustainable way to generate energy.

Humanities

I was looking forward to Humanities 9, because it focuses a lot on history. The past is something I’ve always been interested in, and this year we are learning in depth about the significant timeline of the past. A powerful project that told the story of the past quite well, was the one we completed for the Winter Exhibition. Vive Les Machines À Métaphores dove into the revolutions. We started by reading a book labeled animal farm that showed the point of view of animals living during that time. After reading the book and creating an infographic about Animal Farm, we moved into groups specific to a revolution. I got assigned to the Haitian Revolution with Maya, Madeline, Ella, Chloe andMilaina. We first learned about the revolution individually by researching and creating an infographic, then came together and built a metaphor machine (Rube Goldberg machine) for the winter exhibition. I was really proud of how our group came together to collaborate and communicate to come out with a final product we were all proud of.

Successes in and out of School

So far this year I have focused on keeping up with my goals and completing them to the best of my ability. Especially over the last few weeks I have really started to do well in a lot of things. I have worked so hard to get to where  I am and I really hope to keep it up. 

Starting off with out of school, I recently got an invite to play 2 ID camp days with the whitecaps coaches. The players who got invited were 2008s 2009s and 2010s. Only around 30 people were there, which is an incredible achievement for me. Right before stepping onto the field for day 1, an email came in inviting me to a BC ID camp. I am really seeing my goals in soccer coming to life right in front of my eyes.

 

School on the other hand has been a lot this year. Throughout high school, each year is getting more and more difficult. I just have received my grades for PLP in the last few weeks, and my goals are real! One of my goals at the beginning of the year included achieving extending in all PLP subjects. This latest report card reflected all the hard work I have put into that goal. I am so proud of myself, now I just have to keep it up!!!

Things I need to Work on

I have many things to work on to help me improve as a learner, but here are a few that stand out to me:

  • In group work, making sure everyone’s voice gets heard 
  • Pausing my work to go help a peer who needs assistance 
  • When collaborating, making sure everyone gets a chance to participate 

To help me improve I can:

  • Attend tutorial times to work in a focused learning space
  • Asking for help when needed, by both peers and teachers
  • Communicate with my group to figure out roles within

How can I grow as a Learner?

I have talked about my VMV, classes and what I can improve on. I have spent so much time reflecting back on the year its truly amazing to think we are already halfway through! Even thinking back to last year, I have grown and changed both as a person and a learner. I feel as if I have grown in group work, making sure everyone gets a chance to participate, which was tough for me last year and even at the beginning of this year. I can always grow more, become a different better version of myself, but one of the main things I can do to help is complete work to the extending level. I love the feeling when a project was just marked and you get a 💯. To keep on top of this I will hand in work before the due date, attend tutorial times when needed, talk to teachers and parents for support and get lots of sleep!

Conclusion

Thank you for listening to my Mpol, I appreciate you listening to my learning journey so far this year.

I will reflect upon this post in my Tpol in June.

Lost In London

By

On March 2, 2025

In Humanities

For the past month or so, our class has been working on a project called Rise of the Frankenstuffies. We have started out by learning all about the background to the Industrial Revolution, and then we started our final assignment for the project.

Our iMovie was the final assignment to show our learning progress throughout the project. 

Driving Question

How can we, as writers, weave historical details into our creative storytelling to convey a clear and impactful message?

I think a big part of historical storytelling is making sure the information is accurate, detailed and informative. Connecting the audience to the storytelling and how the story is told is important. When the readers are interested and engaged in the story it makes more of an impact because they care about the problems in the world, and how they can help to fix them. And example is the Covid 19 pandemic. In the past there had been multiple pandemics such as the Plague, the Spanish flu, Smallpox and many more. Covid taught me a lot about how much impact people can have in the world. First responders worked day and night to make sure communities were the safest possible. Every night at 7 everyone in my neighbourhood banged pots and pans together, played instruments and even the bagpipes making noise to show our appreciation to our first responders. Even though we couldn’t come within 6ft of each other, we stuck together and got through the pandemic. Weaving details into storytelling can make an impact on the world to connect people and to bond over things we feel passionately about. 

What is the Industrial Revolution?

The Industrial Revolution happened from 1760-1840. A revolution is ‘a forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system.’ As I learned about revolutions, and Haiti before winter break we had a good start on what a revolution is. Check out my post here.

Within the Industrial Revolution many things happened, such as women starting to work in factories, coal mining and railroad being built. So many things impacted the Industrial Revolution and this project was one to summarize it.

To first get into the swing of things we watched a BBC video and were told to create doodle notes on provided templates. I had a ton of fun creating these notes, as doodling and visually learning help me remember information well.


Urbanization Game

This assignment was designed for us to get a feel for how packed the towns were when new inventions and people were starting to get added. We started out by having few houses and a comfortable town. As the game moved along more things were added. Things escalated quickly as soon as more people arrived. More people means more food, more housing, more roads, more more more. When everything adds up, you can see how crowded places can get, and fast.

Puzzle 

In this puzzle we learned about a specific part of the Industrial Revolution, then filled in the other parts from other classmates who learned about other things. I learned about Transportation, and I found it interesting to compare to today’s transportation. 

Now that we had learned all about the importance of the Industrial Revolution we could start with what it had all lead up to, our Frankenstuffies! We started by cutting up our old stuffies and sewing them together! I had a lot of fun creating mine, I found it oddly relaxing to take them apart and put them back together. With our stuffies complete we had a few more things to do before filming and editing could begin; our hero’s journey and storyboarding. 

Hero’s Journey

This was the part that took the most time because we had to basically write out our entire story, but separated into categories. The categories signified how the story moves on from the beginning to end. Each category represents a part of the story with lots of detail describing the events going on. 



Storyboarding

Storyboarding was so much easier as soon as the Hero’s journey was done. All I had to do was take the information from my Hero’s journey and put it in the storyboard and accompany it with some drawings.

Filming and Editing

I struggled with filming because it was tough to get the stuffy to be straight, not wiggle and cooperate with me. Since I had decided to weave my story through with Madeline’s, we needed to film our stuffies together and have them be in most scenes with each other. It was a complicated process to get filming done, and we needed multiple people to help with holding the stuffies on the green screen someone to film, etc.. Editing was a completely different story. I struggled a bit with iMovie working, because my images were zoomed in too far, and I had to figure out how to zoom out and have the image the correct size. My green screen on top of the image, then was floating, so those images needed to be zoomed in, but not to much or else it would be blurry. Lots and lots of tweaking and changing my movie later, I started to drift closer to my final draft. We all handed in 3 different drafts. Draft one was just to show we had something done.

Draft two, my feedback was this:

And eventually, our final draft was handed in! It was done! 

Conclusion

I enjoyed this project because it was a challenge for me. My strengths do not include storytelling / writing, and creating videos. The more of these things I do, the better I become at them, despite how I feel about them. It’s ok to not enjoy something, because you’ll get better the more you work at it. 

I found learning about the Industrial Revolution very interesting to learn about, as it’s something I’ve never learned or heard about it before much. I learned so much about how the world has evolved. The more information I take in about the past, the more puzzle pieces I can stitch together to look at the big picture. 

Thanks for reading, another post coming later this week!

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