Hello and welcome back to my very average blog! It’s about that time of the year when I fall behind in work and get very stressed but thankfully that’s not the topic of this blog post. This post is about all that I’ve done this year. Every year PLP has and end of year presentation that we share with our teachers and parents. These are called TPols and this is a chance I get to reflect on the learning I’ve done throughout the year.

Driving Question

Why do you feel you are ready to advance to the next grade level?

Humanities:

Although I have plenty of time to fill this page with writing about all the assignments we’ve done I think it would be much better for me to spend my time talking about the ones that impacted me the most this year. If you would like to see what it is like when I get a bit too carried away with writing you can go check out my MPOL from this year.
At the very beginning of the year we were introduced to the theme of this years learning, last year it was all about our worldview but this year it is very different. The theme for this year was filmmaking, this meant we would be making a few short films. Just kidding, we made plenty more than just a few films and this was quite clear because we were assigned four films to complete just in a week long school trip. I’m talking about this trip because it, yet again was a great learning experience and plenty of fun too.

Although I’ve mentioned this a countless amount of times this year, the one assignment that I feel I learned the most on is our Revolutions projects. Not only did this refine my filmmaking skills as we had to make 4 more films but this also taught me about 4 huge historical events at the same time. I bet you’re reading this right now thinking that sounds amazing but that’s not quite the extent of my learning in this project as I also improved so much in staying organized with my group. In this project we really didn’t have too much time to get each assignment done so we had to learn to communicate very well within our group to meet each deadline on time. If someone in our group hadn’t completed something in time then it would’ve meant that we were going to fall behind so I’m actually quite proud of myself and my group for doing so well.

Maker:

Sticking to the theme of this year we started maker off with another film once we were finished that film it was that time of the year when we were all stressed about the winter exhibition. The theme for this years winter exhibition was Star Wars. There were two parts to this exhibition though. In Maker we worked on making something from Star Wars using Launch. From doing that I learned some things about making clay models and I got a reminder of what it is like to take a more organized approach to something again, which I’m not very good at. Like I said earlier there were two parts to this exhibition and the second part is where I think I did a lot more learning. For the humanities part we were asked to make a story within Star Wars in small groups. The reason I found this part so much better for my learning is because it has been a very long time since I’ve written a story. I’ve done plenty of writing assignments but I haven’t written a fully structured story in a long time. Not only have I revisited an old skill in the humanities part of this but I also did this while working with a group so it took lots of communication to make each of our parts of the story fit into each others.
The biggest defining thing about this year was how Covid-19 affected our learning. It made a lot of changes to our assignments but surprisingly we still got to do our DI performance. The reason I’m including this assignment over some other ones is because it shows how flexible the students and teachers are, and we were able to figure out a new way to present even though we couldn’t meet in a classroom. It was also tough to get our whole group back on track, but we were able to make changes to our performance by just doing a few zoom calls.

PGP:

When I saw the list of PGP assignments it looked like we didn’t get very much learning done in PGP but that is not the case. I’ve mentioned this many times before but the TYKTWD assignment was one of my favourite assignments. It taught me all about my moms work and how a day would be like for her. It also taught me better interviewing skills and how to organize all my footage. The video I made for this project was similar to some of the ones I’d already made but it was so much harder because I had so much to focus on in that day and I was surprised how useful it was to just write notes in things and creating folders for all my footage. Staying organized is something that I always get lazy with so it was cool to see that I actually do know how to keep on track of things like that.
throughout the rest of the year we’ve been doing some smaller assignments and we revisited the 7 habits from last year which we are currently working on a final project for it.

Scimatics:
Game of exponents
Correlation Vs Causation
Chemistry stories
Like terms
Metaphor machines
Time is money
Meiosis models

In Scimatics this year we’ve been doing plenty of small projects alternating between math and science. Each of these projects we learn about a topic and find a cool way to present it. My favourite of these projects we did this year was our metaphor machines. In this project we found a fun way to learn about electronics and show our learning in a cool way. Unfortunately I wasn’t there for the whole project I was there for the activities leading up to it and I got to be apart of designing our metaphor machine. The thing I enjoyed the most about this project was being able to make something. In Scimatics we’ve made plenty of projects on the iPad but not many did we actually get to design and assemble something. I find this is how I learn the best and I think it shows because I think I learned a lot in this project.

So that’s how my year went and just like last year I did lots of learning and made some good memories with all the things we’ve done.