🤍 Melissa’s Blog 🤍

“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.”

Looking back on my learning this year in grade 9, I realized that passion is the key to my success. While I have times where my work did not showcase my enthusiasm, I have also experienced projects that I found interest in that would reflect my creativity and love for learning.

This year I’ve worked on so many projects that helped me grow as a learner, some highlights for me were Metaphor Machines, and Let’s Get Riel.

Metaphor Machines

During this project I got to learn about the Revolution of Meiji. My group and I learned the story of the revolution and then got to work making a machine to represent it. At first when hearing about this I wondered how that could ever be possible, but after learning about metaphors and doing a worksheet showing us how to do them, I was able to make a connection to my machine that represented an event in the storyline of the Meiji Revolution. My connection was a ball on a string that swung from one side of the machine to another representing the government of Meiji swinging into new ideas. And my other group members made amazing connections too! Here’s a photo of the machine:

Let’s Get Riel

In this project we learned about Louis Riel and how he was portrayed. I enjoyed this project because we also got to learn about grammar. I love writing and telling a story and at one point wanted to be an author. I loved to learn about punctuation and how to make your writing proper because I love to get my opinions across properly and clearly so they can be understood in the easiest way possible. In this project I got to expand on my knowledge of writing and punctuation by learning new skills that will help me later on in life.

Science

This year in science I had a lot of fun learning about advanced food chains, the periodic table, electricity, and especially how cells reproduce. I always love learning about cells and how they work and I’ve found them super cool since I had my first lesson on them in grade 8. In that lesson we learned about how the body and cells react when you get sick, I learned so much in that class and it answered so many of my questions like how the body fights off bad germs and the different types of cells. In my project on reproductive cells this year, Seeing Double, I learned about how different types of cells and creatures reproduce.

This project also answered a lot of my questions about the different types of reproduction, and how different animals or plants reproduce! Here’s a video I made with my group members representing the stages of mitosis!

Rocky Mountain High

One great learning experience for me was the storytelling in the Rockies field study. At first when I found out about this trip, I didn’t want to go, but after a while of thinking I finally decided to leave my comfort zone and go. Not only did I learn loads of facts about the Canadian pacific railroad that I often annoy my family with, but I also got super close with a few of my classmates and got to know them even better.

Over that trip we learned about the journey of how the railroad was made, and we got to visit different museums and landmarks to help us learn. 

Moving Forward

To do better in future projects, I’m going to try to find passion in all my projects by finding things I like to do in them. Such as writing stories, drawing, building, and designing. I want to be able to dedicate more time to them. By the end of this year I want to be able to find passion in all my work in order to exceed.

Have you ever wondered why your brain works and why it’s so difficult to have relationships? During the past week my class spent a few hours a day learning about ourselves, and I know that may sound weird but we learned about how we think and create relationships with one another.

This year in PLP the whole grade 9 group went on a 5 day trip to loon lake, here’s a few things we did and learned while we were there.

When we first arrived we all met in the gym, after a while of getting organized we were assigned our rooms and were sent up to the dining house for dinner. At dinner we would all get assigned seats 

The first day we learned about what types of leaders we are, the types we’re modeler, Challenger, inspirer, enabler, and encourager, I was an enabler. We figured this out by answering 30 questions from a scale of 1-5, the questions would be a statement and your number would be how much you agree with that statement, 1 being that doesn’t apply to me at all and 5 would be that applies to me all the time. This lesson was our first step into learning about the uniqueness in ourselves.

The second day we learned about our social needs and triggers, we were asked to think about situations that push you away (threat)  and situations that pull you toward (reward).  We wrote down a list of about 5 things for each category, then we learned about our natural reactions to social situations. Something I found interesting in this lesson was that our social needs are like survival needs and that’s why some people get social anxiety. 

The third day we learned about our passions and the things we love, we went into partners and took turns asking each other “what do you love” repeatedly until we both had around 20 things each. It helped us learn more about our values, then we made lists of what we’re good at, then we would see if any of the things matched up. Then we sorted our lists into a table with 4 categories, the first was things that we like to do and are good at, the second was things we are good at but don’t like to do, the third was something you like but aren’t very good at, and the fourth was something you aren’t good at and don’t like.

On the fourth day we learned about emotional inteligance, we all were given 5 cards and went around the room finding people that we thought deserved the card we had, the cards would say things like “self control” or “empathy” and we would give those cards to the people we thought fit those things. It helped us learn more about ourselves and what other people see us showing.

And on the fifth and last day we learned about our own diversity and what we can and can’t control, we had a picture of 2 categories, internal dimensions and external dimensions, and we were asked to circle 3 of the words inside each catagory that we thought about a lot. The internal dimensions had things impacted by only you like your age, your abilities and the way you express yourself, while the external dimensions focused on things impacted by you and others, the things listed in external dimensions were like your relationships, your language, and your appearance.

In this blog post, I want to share my experience and the lessons I learned during an amazing trip through the Rocky Mountains. This trip allowed me to appreciate the unique heritage and geography of the West. Join me as I reflect on my personal growth and the incredible places I had the privilege to explore.

This journey provided an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the geography that shapes the West. Through visits to Cave and Basin National Historic Park, Columbia Icefield, Rogers Pass, 3 Valley Gap, Lake Louise, Lake Minnewanka, Lake Moraine, Peyto Lake, and the Golden Skybridge, I witnessed firsthand the cool sights and learned about the geological processes that have shaped these areas.

While on the trip, we were all asked the question, how has the geography of the west shaped who we are? From what I learned, my answer is the West’s geography shaped us through its vast landscapes, adventurous spirit, and abundant resources.

Reflecting on my journey through the West, I cannot help but feel grateful for the invaluable lessons learned along the way. From conquering procrastination to immersing myself in the geography and cultural diversity of the region, this trip has reshaped my perspective and enriched my personal growth. It is important to embrace new experiences, challenge ourselves, and appreciate the world around us. The West has given me a deeper understanding of our diverse and beautiful country

This past year has been one of the best school years I’ve had, I learned so much in Maker, Humanities, and Science in PLP this year, and I also had so many new experiences! In this blog post I will be talking about how much I’ve grown as a learner throughout the subjects I learned about this year, and my habits and work ethic.

This year in Science we learned about the immune system (small but mighty) matter (mind over matter), and tectonic plates (journey to the centre of the earth). I think I did my best work on the first project we worked on, which was small but mighty, here’s a link to the blog post I wrote about it: https://www.blog44.ca/melissag/2023/03/10/small-but-mighty/

We also made video games using scratch about the next project we worked on (mind over matter) I think I did a good job representing the states of matter in my game, here’s the link if you want to play it:  https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/843875581/

In Humanities this year, we learned about the outsiders, the Middle Ages (power play), the renaissance (radical innovations), Vikings (blue-eyed brutes in horned helmets), the colonization of Canada (consequences of colonization) and our final project, which was about how commercials effect you to make you want to buy their products, for that project we got to go to Oregon for a week! I really liked learning about the advertising techniques used to make people want to buy a product. When we went to Oregon, we got to interview the owners of some companies and make our own ads for them! I had such a fun time learning about my business, Marine Discovery Tours. Here is the ad I made for them, which was picked to be the biggest poster that we showed at the PLP exhibition!

Everyone in the group I was in made an ad, too which we showed at the exhibition this year! Here’s a picture of our stand:

My advertisement was on the easel, you can’t see it in this photo but it was there.

This year, in maker we learned about the cool things your iPad can do, we used apple apps like Keynote, Pages, iMovie, Photos, Camera, etc.. I won’t go into too much detail on what we learned about in Maker because I already talked about a lot of this in my mPOL. One of the things I did best in this subject was my interesting images keynote, I also showed this in my mPOL but I’m very proud of it. Here it is:

A main thing I could’ve worked on this year was getting my work done in time, I liked learning about the subjects we worked on this year, but I often got distracted from my work. I can say I did try harder this semester to get my work done. I know I still got some assignments late and will continue setting a timer for every day at 4:00 to remind me to do my homework.

Even though I haven’t shown that I can almost always hand my work in on time. I am ready for grade 9, and will walk into my first class of grade 9 with a hopeful attitude. I hope that I can have more motivation to get my work done and listen in class and will try my best to achieve these goals.

For the past few months, my class has been learning about cells!

The first thing we did (learning about cells) was we looked at some presentations that our teacher made, the presentations were about famous scientists such as Robert Hooke, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, Theodor Schwann, Matthias Schleiden, and Robert Remak. They all discovered cells and helped make up the cell theory, which is:

1. The cell is the basic unit of life

2. All living things are made up of cells

3. All cells come from pre-existing cells

While we worked on the cell theory, we also got to look at our own cells with a swab and an agar. We looked at lots of cool things, here are some pictures of what we saw! (After that we made a field journal of what we saw.)

The next thing we worked on was the immune system! We learned about the different types of cells and how they protect the body. The different types of cells are, the antibody, the B cell, the T cell, the white blood cell, and the macrophage. We learned about what each cell does. the B cell makes antibodies to kill the pathogen (which is a disease or virus), the memory T cells remember how the immune system killed the pathogen, the killer T cells dissolve the pathogen. The helper T cell, along with the white blood cell, alert the immune system that it is under attack. The Macrophage eats the pathogen if the killer T cell doesn’t kill it. The antibodies are stuck on the pathogen by the white blood cell like an “eat me” tag for the macrophage. We also made pages documents explaining each cell as a character. Here’s an example of what I made:

Next we learned about vaccines. We learned about the conspiracies that people have made about vaccines and how they work. We also learned about the types of vaccines which were:

1. Inactivated Vaccines

Inactivated Vaccines are when you take some of the virus or bacteria, kill or inactivate it, and then inject it into the blood so the body recognizes it and makes antibodies for it. 

2. Live, Attenuated Vaccines: 

Live, attenuated vaccines use chemicals to attenuate the pathogen, which prevents it from causing disease. 

3. Subunit Vaccines: 

The Subunit vaccine puts a small piece of virus or pathogen and makes is very obvious to the body there is a pathogen.

4. mRNA Vaccines: 

mRNA vaccines are a copy of the recipe to build the structure of the pathogen into a vaccine, which is given to the cell and then is built by the cell. 

Next we made some health posters for kids, using their drawings of pathogens! Here’s mine:

For my Pandora’s box project I think I tried my best. My theme was corporate greed and I tried my best on my box. It didn’t end up looking like the design I made but I like it more then my design, because most people ended up making boxes the same as my original idea and mine was different. I bought a big wooden treasure chest and painted it black and put a tech-y design on the outside to make it look like a futuristic machine. Then I got my dad to cut a whole in the front and he glued some see through plastic to it so it looked like a window. Then I made a tree and an off/on button out of felt. I made some white clouds for the background and painted it blue, then I painted the floor green and added extra designs, like a dragon, some stones, and a river. Here’s how my original design looked: 

 I don’t have a picture of how it ended up looking but I think I described it well.

The Middle Ages

A Sum of What we’ve Learned this Unit

In this humanities class, in this unit, we learned about the Middle Ages, here is a sum of what we’ve learned this unit. The Middle Ages were a rough time to be alive, they would kill and live unhealthy fast lives, without thinking it through. In the Middle ages, people were killed because of suspicions, differences, religion, and biased thoughts. Say you were a woman, happily living alone without troubles, the people who lived in the town could suspect that you are a witch and burn down your house, if you would survive, that would mean they were right and you were a witch, and they’d kill you, and if you didn’t survive, you weren’t a witch, but it was worth losing an innocent person in order to know the truth. 

       Peasants would work all day and wouldn’t sleep in proper beds, they wouldn’t eat proper meals, and would have to ration, while the king and the higher class people would be having a feast in the castle. The king would want to be bigger and eat more, because that was a sign of having money and riches. Peasants were more healthy and fit than the king, they would work all day and eat vegetables and fruits because those were less expensive if not free, depending on if their job was a farmer or not. The classes and power were organized into a pyramid, with the king on the top, the nobles just below him, knights below the nobles, and peasants on the bottom. On the very top, just above the triangle would be the church, because they would tell you about messages from god, and tell them they would go to hell if they didn’t do certain things. There would be stories of how awful hell was, there would be fire everywhere, devils and Satan, people would be tortured for eternity. 

Because people cared a lot less about lives, there were more wars and violence, like The Crusades. The Crusades started in 1095 and lasted almost 200 years ending in 1291. They started because Pope Urban II made a speech, inspiring Christians to fight against Islams for Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a sacred land where Jesus lived and died for Christian’s. They could’ve just had a conversation about Jerusalem, but the two sides already didn’t like each other, so they just fought. To make it worse, the battles didn’t end because they realized fighting was wrong or useless, they ended because they ran out of money. The battles were very expensive, and they had to end the wars because of that. Nobody really won, they just ended the battle. 

The Crusades were a really dark time to be alive, and we’re lucky to be born in such a peaceful time.

How To Get Started with Drawing

I got into drawing at a young age, so young that I don’t remember when I started drawing, but I do remember I would spend hours and hours and hours drawing and perfecting, one memory I have is I used to draw circles but I would draw a bunch of circles over each other, I would get mad at myself and try to only draw one circle, but I couldn’t, so I went from not being able to draw one circle alone, to drawing somewhat realism and shading. 

  My suggestions for starting drawing

I’d suggest just drawing small things that you know how to draw and go from there, try to have an open mindset about your drawings and avoid thinking things like “this sucks, nobody would like it,” and “I’m never gonna be good at this,” If you think those things, you won’t try to get better, and will end up getting nowhere. If you think positive things like “That’s a great arm,” or “That’s a good start to drawing chairs,” chances are you’ll keep getting better and better.  If you’re ever stumped on what to draw, I’d just draw a line and see where you go from there. Once you draw a line, you’ve started and now you’ll be more motivated to finish. I also really like to listen to music while I’m drawing. You might be different, but it helps me picture what I want to do. If you don’t know a good technique, I’d recommend that you tried tracing, I learned a bunch of my techniques from tracing, you can trace your favourite cartoon characters, or some pictures you took from real life, either ones would work to help your skills grow. You can also look up online tutorials for drawing certain things, they have drawing tutorials for almost everything. 

Basic Skills and Techniques

The most basic skills are being able to draw people and everyday items you can find in our world. Sometimes people draw cartoon characters or try to draw things in a cartoony style. Most people start out drawing cats or their families or rainbows, generally what they like. Mostly little kids draw their family or friends, flowers or cars, anything they like or want to draw, even littler kids or abstract artists like to scribble all over the page, abstract art is in high demand nowadays.

      I like to draw cartoony people and sometimes realism, I’m not good at realism yet but I’ve been trying harder on it lately, just last year I drew a realistic drawing of a character from a book I was reading, for a project. She was the first person I ever drew in realism. Then, in the summer I tried to draw another realistic drawing of Eleven from Stranger Things, it didn’t turn out as good but I’m still practicing. You can also draw things you wish you had, like a bigger house or a better phone. You can also draw blueprints for a house or draw the exterior, you don’t have to build it it’d just be for fun!

Projects

So far we’ve done quite a few projects and assignments over the past couple months, we’ve made a WordPack, a Digital Selfie, and more. All these assignments have some sort of connection. I’ve picked three assignments/projects to talk about for this post.

WordPack

For the WordPack we learned about using “I am” statements to describe ourselves, for example; instead of saying “I draw” you could say “I’m an artist”. The assignment was a fun way to learn more about ourselves and possibly boost our confidence.

Laptop Memoji

The Laptop Memoji assignment is my favourite so far, I had so much fun doing it and think I will use the keynote skills I learned in the future. For the Laptop Memoji I learned how to add stickers to my Memoji, I learned how to remove the background of a photo using keynote (which I have used many times outside of school since). I also learned how to fill a sticker with a photo. I even ended up teaching my friends and family how to add stickers to their Memojis.I would add photos but some of the pictures I used for stickers are not licensable.

Thank you for reading about my projects!