Hello welcome back to my blog! Today I will be talking about our first grade 9 humanities project for the year. This project started on the first day of school when the teachers told us we are going to write a letter. They also mentioned how it was based on a website called CommonLit, where we would read short stories and answer questions on them. I will talk more about the CommonLit stuff later but for now let’s start with the driving question. As you probably know every project has a Driving Question so for this project it was How do people and the environment affect each other? So I answered that throughout this project by completing all the assignments and with my letter. To make sure that I do not bore you with a lot of extra information I will just talk about the most important parts/milestones from the project.

Project Intro:

The first step to this project was creating a Topic Pitch. This pitch had to be our specific topic for our letter that we got to pick, as well as some links that provide information on the topic your wanted to do. So I chose to do electric vehicle use in BC and the actions that can be taken to promote EV (electric vehicles). Then we did a mini interview with the teachers and told them about our topic to then get it approved. 

Milestone 1:

The next had to pick who we were going to write to so after doing some research I chose Terry Beech aka the elected government of 2021. After picking our topic and who we were going to write to we had another conference with one of our teachers also known as Milestone 1. But this time we had to find a lot more information about our topic like the actual problem, our solution ideas, a letter outline that we created, and some questions we had for our teachers. So after getting all that prepared and then later on approved, I just had to find more information specific to the problem which for me was gas vehicle emissions. I am happy with how this letter conference went because I came prepared with what I was going to tell my teacher about what I was going to write about, and I also got good feedback on what I can do to make the letter I was going to make better.

Milestone 2: 

For this project as I mentioned above half of our project was in something called CommonLit. In CommonLit we read 5 different stories and completed other activities as well. For Milestone 2 we had to worked on analyzing the power of word choice and analyzing how author use evidence and structure to support a claim so all 5 of the stories we read and all the other activities we did helped me understand how to do this and how to write a good response at the same time. I think I did a lot of growing in this milestone because at the start my response to the questions from the stories were not the best but as we kept reading other stories and kept working on this I can see a lot of growth in my learning as a student.

The Letter:

After finding all the information I needed I finally started working on my letter. For my letter I ended up doing 4 drafts so I will add all 4 at the end of this paragraph. My letter was based off of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and how much gas vehicles produce them. So for my letter that was basically the main problem and my solution was educating the public more about EV’s and how much better they are for the environment because they do not produce as much GHG emissions and they also use clean energy which I also mentioned. I am really happy with how my letter turned out and so that you can read it as well I will add all 4 drafts of it so that you can see it from the very start and all the changes I added along the way.

Milestone 3:

After writing our letter and working on multiple drafts of it we moved on to the very last milestone, CommonLit Connections multi paragraph response. For this we had to pick one of the stories that we read that we thought best connected to our letter. So I chose to do Lee Sherman and the Toxic Louisiana Bayou. I chose that story because it was about a guy named Lee Sherman and how he worked for a business who was not good to there employees. So I related my letter to the part in the story when the company Lee Sherman works for tells him to go on a secret job so because he does not want to get fired he does it, but the job was to put toxic waste into a bayou which later on he learned contaminated multiple fish and other animals. This relates the best to my letter because in my letter I talk about how gas vehicles are producing greenhouse gas emissions and polluting the environment. So I think that about sum’s up what I wrote about in my common lit connections essay. For Milestone 3 we had to use writing and design process to revise and edit, blend context and evidence to write strong explanations, and construct a persuasive multi paragraph letter. I think I did all of those in both my letter and in my multi paragraph essay and I am really happy with how both turned out.

Anyway that about rap’s up this project but in the end I actually really enjoyed this project and I am proud of everything I learned and the growth that I experienced. You never know in a few weeks I could be getting a letter back from Terry Beech, because we did actually print and mail our letters. We walked in the cold rain yesterday as a finish to the project to go and put our letters in the mail box. So here is a nice photo of the grade 9 plp class with our umbrellas in the rain and also some pictures I got of me mailing my letter. I hope you enjoyed reading this post and I hope I did not forget anything important that I was supposed to add.