Full Steam Ahead 🚂

Toot toot..!

In Humanities Ms. Madsen led a project called Full Steam Ahead. We learned about the Industrial Revolution and its impacts on society. The final result was for us to present a slam poem about a chosen impact of the Industrial Revolution. It could be about the consequences of urbanization, the impacts on the workers, environmental consequences and more. 

The first thing we did was deepen our understanding of the Industrial Revolution. We started by reading through some textbook pages and watching videos. Our first keystone was to create two graphic organizers. One about the steam engine and the other of three important innovations that came from the Revolution. 

 

I am not super proud of my steam engine graphic organizer because I got confused about what to put in underlying conditions. 

The second keystone was to write a formal paragraph about a focus of the industrial revolution impacts that interested us. We could choose from this list: 

– the environmental consequences of the Industrial Revolution

– the consequences of urbanization

– the consequences for workers

– the impact on and consequences for war

– the impact on children

– select a specific technological innovation and focus on its impact

I was stuck between the consequences for workers and environmental consequences. I almost did the workers but settled on writing about the environment. The environmental impacts was probably the easiest one to talk about. 

This project was all about the process, I had to create multiple drafts of my paragraph. I started off writing about what I knew and want I needed to know. Then I headed off to start my paragraph. My peers and teachers helped critique my paragraph to make it the best it could be. In the end, I had about 3 drafts. This was my finished result!

The Industrial Revolution was the starting place of many great things, but it also had drawbacks such as its negative impact on our environment. First off, the burning of fossil fuels like oil, natural gasses and coal resulted in a lot of air pollution. For example, coal which was the main fuel source of the Industrial Revolution, and was used to power the steam engine and factories, created a large amount of soot to be spewed out, in addition to significant amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gasses made the Earth go above normal temperatures, which in turn, impacted the world’s natural biodiversity of both plants and animals and lead to the mutation or extinction of some species. In addition, other toxic threats to plants and animals were heavy metals like lead. Scientists claim that the “Industrial Revolution caused an epidemic of metal intoxication” (source), and the impact continues even into today. Not only did lead make its way into the rivers and other water sources, but so did raw sewage that came from the factories. This was due to the fact they did not have effective protection in the plumbing system to keep the sewage from mixing with water, and unfortunately, people drank the polluted water unknowingly. Also, since machines were replacing human labour, people moved from rural areas to the cities. This made the demand for houses higher, but there was limited land to build on, and so trees got cut down. People also wanted lumber to build, as there was a need for more factories, houses and farmlands were expanding which all resulted in deforestation. Given all these factors, it is said that the Industrial Revolution is one of the reasons climate change began. In the end, while great inventions and advances and enhancements in technology came about from the Industrial Revolution, one must not forget the environmental impacts and sacrifices that came as a result as well.”

I am proud of my paragraph and I do feel like revising it over and over again made it way better and had more of a flow. 

Finally, we moved on to the part I had been dreading.. writing the slam poem. To present what we learned the knowledge we gathered had to be converted into a slam poem. The slam poem would be about the focus we chose as well. I did not know what a slam poem was, I knew it was more like a story-like poem but I had never heard one. In class we watched a video of Shane Koyczan presentinghis poem “To This Day”.  Well watching it I picked up on some characteristics he used to capture his audiences attention. He starts with a little story then slowly eases into his poem. He speeds up at intense parts and raises his voice which creates different moods for each part of his poem he is talking about.

 

 

I had to find a way to make sure I presented my slam poem as powerfully as I could.

Just like my paragraph, I had to revise my poem several times. I am not a huge fan of poetry so it took me a little while to figure out how to make it rhyme and flow.

I called my poem “What Are We Doing?” and this is how it turned out:

I do not like presenting so when I heard that we had to present our poem in front of the whole class I internally freaked out. But on the day off I decided I should just get it over with so I volunteered myself to go 4th! Even though I spoke a bit fast I am proud of myself for taking the jump to be one of the first people. 

The driving question of this project was “How can slam poetry help us connect to issues?”  At the start, I kind of wondered why we had to write a slam poem about the industrial revolution because I didn’t think a poem about coal was going to pull on many heartstrings. But the more I understood the project the more I understood why the end result was going to be a slam poem. Slam poetry allows people to talk about a message they want to share in passionate, and captivating ways. Many people use slam poetry to bring society’s issues to light. Instead of just reading that ice bergs are melting and skimming past article on a newspaper slam poetry channels people’s emotions that they feel to others and it resonates with the audience.

Bye! ❤️

About me!

About me!

 

My name is Kira and I’m a PLP learner at Seycove. I will be including some photos I have edited and took in class to show more about my self.

This is my name in photos, it was hard to find interesting subjects that could create my name ( K is a letter in a sign, I is a Christmas light, R is a branch of a Christmas tree and A is from a book cover). After we took photos we had to a sort them into our name in keynote. Then we learned about adding shadows, borders, and reflections to make it more eye catching. Or realistic. Here is my finished result:

Then we had to create a personal collage about what’s on our mind or what we think about. Sometimes the most random things pop up in my head but I stuck with the more practical thoughts. When creating this we had to draw doodles to spice it up and add borders and reflections for a 3D effect. Also using our keynote skills we used instant alpha to make transparent backgrounds, and we also masked images into shapes. Here is how my collage turned out:

We ventured into keynote some more and learned about how to create a GIF. We learned about animations and transition between 2 slides. My sister was singing “I believe i can fly” so I decided to make a GIF with her flying in it. As I’m writing this I realize it might have been better to do a Live Photo and make it bounce between movements but I can’t do that anymore.

Here is my GIF:

Becoming A PLP Learner

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This is my customized memoji/memoji laptop, the people with stretched out faces are my friends (I do have friends). 

The driving question for this project was, “How Do I Build & Strengthen The PLP Learning Team?” 

The first big thing we did was the big life journal (lots of “bigs”), and during this I realized that I have a lot of interests and I mapped down all of the things I could get better at. There ended up being 5 different chapters we had to do and in each one we wrote about our strengths and stretches. Also, we went deeper into our lifelong goals and hopes. Then we were told to pick 3 assignments and amp them up! Here are the before and after:

  • This is my mantra

To build team strength we did team challenges. The first one was a spaghetti tower and my group was really awkward at the time (after all, it was the first time we ever collaborated) so we struggled a bit. As we did more group work and challenges our group started supporting each other more and realizing everyone’s strengths (💪). Some people were good at presenting well another was good at writing things down and creating ideas fast. The hardest one we did was probably the cup challenge, the goal was to stack 6 cups on top of each other with an elastic band that had strings attached to it. We had to each take a string and pull the elastic and put it around a cup to move it to the position we wanted it to be. Sadly, we never finished (big surprise) because our cups kept on falling over and not cooperating (very rude in my opinion). We did more challenges, but our last one was the spaghetti challenge again… Our group thought we had a different idea but didn’t…it was almost the exact same (shows our creative juices 😎). Although, even if it was the same we definitely improved on talking to each other because everyone contributed even if it was in the slightest bit. Here is our first and last towers!

  • This was our first tower

For teachers to get to know more about us we were assigned to make a user manual about ourselves. There were multiple categories we had to write about like, warnings, trouble shooting and tips to maintain performance. The hardest one to write was probably trouble shooting because I didn’t know how to write about what to do when I’m in “distress”. We had to format the document to the exact same as the teachers and doing that helped us figure out how to use features of pages! Here our some parts of my user manual:

Then we had to make a blog post of how we work in a team, this was difficult for me because I was trying to learn how to use my blog (I still am). The post included my Memoji laptop, a paragraph of how I work in a team, some parts of my user manual, another paragraph explaining my creative media (hip hip hurray) and then my actual video I made. It explains how I work in a team (creative media). I had fun creating my creative media because I enjoyed editing it but I could have done way better. If you haven’t seen my creative media here it is:My Creative Media sorry if the slides where to short I couldn’t upload the full video.

All of this work came up to one big assignment, a keynote guided tour (for an exhibition). In this tour we had all of our work we created (most of it at least), and we presented it to the parents. The presentation was fun to make and we got to learn a lot more about keynote, I’ve learned a lot about keynote (Im practically a expert, not). For example when making the Memoji laptop I learned how to erase the backgrounds of photos and in the keynote guided tour I learned how to link words to slides in the presentation. Here is a video of my Keynote Guided Tour

Not everything for the exhibition was on an iPad (plot twist) we also created a physical piece out of a variety of material. This was quite hard because my brilliant brain of mine had a whole plan set up then realized you were aloud one of each material. So I picked a different box and tried to use the same idea. My idea was this:

The hot air ballon states big ideas and the person is me (obviously), and it shows how I’m made out of different things. When I created this I used box A instead and it was much easier to create something with it. I never took a picture of the finished product all together, my bad, but the photo is what my hot air balloon ended up looking like. I never got a photo of my person so I have drawn a draft of what it did look like. The colours on my person represent different things, and here is what they mean Yellow: sunshine, happiness, warmth Orange: joy, creativity, determination, enthusiasm, fun Blue: calm trust intelligence Brown: safety stability dependability  Green: nature, taking action, growth White (its my head): purity, balance, understanding. Here is my photo of what my creation looked like:

In the end I think I’ve learned a lot and I’ve gotten better at working in a team. What I bring is inclusiveness (that’s a word?) and creativity (super original). I can show my learning through projects better then presenting in my opinion. I had fun working with group 4 and this was our very last project we did to together. It was a “horror” film trailer our star actors are Christian as the innocent boy and Hayden as the creepy stalker/murder. Keenan was the producer? And I was the camera guy. Sadly Naomi wasn’t there, but she was in spirit (so sentimental). Here is the amazing video: Very Horrific Film

Group members blogs!

Caden

Hayden

Naomi

Christian 

Keenan 

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