Welcome back to another reflection blog post! Time to delve back into the world of reflecting, observing, and commenting! Now if you haven’t read my mPOL blog post, check it out here. This one’s called a tPOL! It stands for: Transitional Presentation Of Learning. Now, I’m reflecting to see if I did all the things I said I would do in that post.  Hopefully I have, but we’ll see!

First, the Driving Question: Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?

This Driving Question is pretty difficult, as I’m not actually going to be in PLP next year. I think how I’m going to write this post though, is if I were going to be in PLP. Mostly, I’ll talk about how I’ve improved, and what I still need to work on. 

Now, as usual, the instructions were to “tell a story”. And, as usual, I have no idea how to do that. So, as usual, lets start with some bullet points!

• The project that did not go so well
• The project that I’m proud of!
• Team work
• Things I struggle with
• Goals to continue with

All right! I already have tons of ideas that are bursting out of my head at each of these bullet points. Obviously, I will forget all of them by the time I get to the bullet point. Oh well, that’s how blog posts go!

“The project that did not go so well” actually isn’t an accurate description of the project I chose. I think overall, my worst project was The Medium is the Message.  I mean, if you aren’t sure, just check out this ad:

Well, I think you can probably see the problem. I already mentioned this in my mPOL post, so I won’t say much now.

In reality, I’m going to talk about:

• The project that didn’t go so well at the start, but got better! 

This project will have to be Destination Imagination. You can check out that post here. Oof. This project was hard. You can check out the post here. This project required a huge amount of teamwork. Oof. I really struggled with teamwork in this project. In the mPOLs I said I thought I had gotten better at it, well, I had. But all this went down the drain with my group. I personally think the problem was that I was the only one who was able to do TIME MANAGEMENT. This was really hard to deal with. I think it really helped me with my time management, but I still don’t think it was all that good.

(This is the YouTube video of our presentation in the end. I have yet to watch it all the way through. It’s just too embarrassing. You can hear the teachers laughing in the background. And we weren’t trying to be funny.)

Because of this, my team really bugged me. It got to the point where a project that I thought would be really fun, resulted in me not wanting to go to school on maker days. In one of our practice presentations, Ms. Maxwell made the comment: “You need to look like you’re having fun. You all look like you hate each other.” Which pretty much sums it up.

But then, on the day we were presenting, it went great! The presentation may not look the best, but it was fun! I enjoyed performing it. And it was fun. And I have to say, it was the best feeling when it was over. And we came 3rd!!!! Mostly from our instant challenge, but still!

• The project that I’m proud of!

I think the project that I’m really proud of was “Argh Matey.” Specifically the humanities version. I’m really proud of all the work I put into it, and how my beautiful comic turned out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the things I struggle with, is that my drawings do not look good. In my eyes they don’t look good. They might, but… I just can’t see it. This makes it very difficult to finish a project like Argh Matey, with all the drawings as the center of your creation. I’m really proud of the way I managed to over come my inability to do the drawing the way I want it.

1. I drew and redrew the heads of all the characters until they were perfect
2. I drew the backgrounds for all my different places
3. I drew all the scientific drawings
4. I copied and pasted the heads into my drawings! Adding bodies as I went

In this way, I didn’t take up masses of time agonizing that “his hair didn’t look realistic enough” or “OMG is that the same colour that his pants were in the previous slide?”

I really like how my project turned out. I learned a lot about European Explorers, and I shared my information in a way that I’m proud of!

There is another project that I’m proud of, which is Chemistry Coding. I really like coding. I’m really proud of this project, because it took a lot of hard work and persistance. We had to create a coded game with Scratch,  that revolved around atoms and molecules. In mine, it was a Catch the Atom game. You had to catch the atoms that were falling in a bowl. There were also snowflakes and fire falling, and if you caught one of them, the atom would fall faster or slower. This showed how atoms react with temperature change.

I’m really proud of how persistant I was. Coding is a pretty hard thing. Every time there was a mistake, I would comb through all the code and target the area that was the problem. I like coding because everything makes sense. Things only happen when you tell them to!

• Teamwork

YAY! My favorite category! In the mPOLs post, I mentioned a lot of things about teamwork. And already a bit in the DI part of this post. I think for teamwork since the mPOLs, I’ve improved in some parts, but in others not so much. The bits I’ve improved on is with the goal I set for myself:

Don’t feel responsible for others’ work and learning, just focus on your own. 

I think that during DI, I really learned how to do this. I realized, all you have to do is believe in your team members. Not everyone has to be exactly like me, and we all get our work done in different ways. At the start I was paranoid we wouldn’t finish in time, but then at the end I was chill! Well, maybe not chill, but I understood that everyone in my group would get it done. And we did! (Almost)

The part that I haven’t improved on is where I don’t do a lot of the work. I tried, I did. It was just whenever someone said: “ok, who should do this.” Then there would be silence and I would end up with that extra work. But like, multiple times. But that’s ok! I didn’t get overwhelmed too much. Just a few times.

• Things I struggle with

There are many things I struggle with. One of the biggest is my stress management. Towards the middle/end of the project I always feel like I’m about to collapse. Like I cannot hand in everything on time, and it will all fail. But then the project’s over, and I feel great! I have noticed that things that help me deal with stress include:

• Exercising
• Meditating
• Setting alarms for the amount of time to work on things

The last one is the one I find work the best. I know that when the alarm goes off, I’m done working on whatever I’m working on. And then it’s over, and there’s no more thinking about it. That’s another problem. It was the question I ended my previous presentation with.

While focusing on MY OWN learning, how can I do work well, and shift away from school during other activities?

And so far the things I was instructed to do during my mPOL have worked. But still not 100%. Especially when I’m not physically going to school now, it’s hard to move away from it. I think I would still like to improve on that.

• Goals to continue with

That’s one of my bigger goals. For next year, I want to keep working on the alarm strategy, and always try and at least start assignments the day I get them. That way, I can have the feeling like I’m on top of it, and it won’t feel like too much work.

Phew! Thanks for reading,

– Kate