Throughout these past two months, I have been able to develop my skills further and regain some of the skills I lost from over summer break. Mainly people tend to disregard school over summer, many of the skills and habits that were created during the school year such as waking up early, doing your homework and attending school have been forgotten about. In saying this, these past couples of months have allowed me to gain back the habits of waking up early, doing my homework, attending school and socializing with my friends more. The two pieces of work that I am most proud of are the ones I will talk about in this post.

 

1st Assignment

The first piece of work that I am really proud of is the project I have done in Business. The project was the Canadian Financial Planning project where you had to choose a city in Canada to stay at for a week and include the costs of everything which was done a couple of weeks ago. This meant that you had to include the costs of where you were going to sleep, food for the whole week including breakfast lunch and dinner, activities, transportation, gifts, and others. This project was completely open-ended meaning that you had the option to do anything you want as long as you planned everything accordingly and calculated everything. In saying this, we had to include a word document as well as a PowerPoint in order to present it to our class. We had to create 2 charts, 1 for our itinerary meaning the activities we would participate in, and the other chart of all of the expenses from food, hotel, transportation and gifts for each day. We had to have a presentation longer than 1 minute but shorter than 5 minutes talking about our favourite destination, what day we most enjoyed, all of the attractions we visited, the restaurants and our daily activities. This project was done to teach us the importance of using financial planning to use when planning for a trip. This is especially important to learn the value of money and learn how to spend it on things that are important as you want to save money as well. Here is the word document that I have created for the presentation. Just click on the link and it will open to a word document.

 

Canadian Vacation Financial Plan

 

 

 

Here is a picture of part of the itinerary chart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And here are pictures to my financial chart

 

 

Also here is my PowerPoint that I gave a presentation on.

Quebec City PowerPoint 

 

 

As all of this information is based on a hypothetical trip,  this meaning that the information provided such as the addresses and amenities are of real addresses but it does not invade any of my privacy as it does not reveal where I am, so it is allowed to post on this website.

 

My goal essentially for this project was first planning the place I would visit and what date I would visit. I then researched the places I would visit such as attractions as well as restaurants including the prices and addresses. I figured that Quebec City included a lot of historical places and had a lot of history so I choose Quebec City as the place I was visiting. I knew that my accommodation was staying with a family member this meant that breakfast would be free and I would spend the first day travelling and the last day travelling. I then needed to figure out where to eat lunch and dinner and how much it would cost and where to spend the rest of my time while there. In saying this, I spent most of my class time researching and planning out all of the details making sure they do not intervene and the transportation routes are possible. Overall, my goal was to first plan out all of the details making sure they make sense, then leading to make the points into full sentences and adding this to my PowerPoint.

 

The reason why I was really proud of this project was that I was able to create such a detailed itinerary and expense list that it was realistic enough to follow through. In saying this, all of the resources, as well as research that I provided including the fares for transportation, extra gifts and extra costs overall, showed my ability to think critically of the expenses that come up in a real vacation. I also found this project very fun to complete as I always like to be extra organized and plan for the unexpected when going somewhere with my family. In the end, I felt I was well versed on how to plan for a trip and in creating a well put financial statement this all showing how I was able to critically think.

 

One of the issues that came along with completing this project was the fact that I got sick while working on it. This meant that I wasn’t able to go as far as I wanted with the project, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t proud of it any less. Being sick meant that I couldn’t spend my weekend working on it, so I had to email my teacher letting her know that the reason that I handed it in was that I was sick. This being said, if I had the opportunity to redo this project I wouldn’t worry so much about including as much information because, in the end, the project turned out well as it was detailed enough.

 

2nd Assignment

 

The second assignment that I am really proud of is the debate I have done in language arts around the topic of the negative effects of technology in order to expand our debating skills.  Essentially the topic sentence was “The Rise of Technology Has Negatively Impacted Society”. While working on the assignment, we first worked doing independent research the first day and the next day we got put into two groups. One of the groups agreed with the topic while the other disagreed. With debating, we learned how to create strong points supported by evidence as well as thinking more critically to rebuttal the other group’s points.  This debate taught me how to expand my ability to think on the spot with the rebuttals as we did not know what the other group’s points were. This project was done around 3 weeks ago. Ultimately, being the team leader for the agreeing side, my main goal was to make sure everyone had a part to play during the debate meaning that everyone got the opportunity to talk.  With this, I had to make sure that everyone in the group had the option to talk, and the ones who wanted to talk more had the option to say the extra points we had. I also wanted everyone’s thoughts and ideas to be included so I would often ask questions to my group members in order to get the discussion going for creating our strong points, and other times I would ask what they thought about the points I wrote down. In saying this, I got feedback on points saying if they agreed with the points or not and what research we could add to make the points stronger.

 

The reason why I seem to be very proud of this assignment as it was the first time I really worked with the people in my English class in order to achieve a common goal. Being the leader, it was the first time I not only worked with the people in my class but I was the main person to create conversations and really allowed people to express their ideas. I also felt that I had a great amount of power and responsibility in my hands because I had to divide all of the work so everyone was included, make sure everyone was doing their work, make ideas clearer and announce what needs to be completed for the next class. Also, considering that we only had 1 class to work on this debate, I felt that I did a great job making sure our group was in order as we had all of our points in order and all of the work was divided.  The only problem that I faced during this assignment was that it was difficult to explain to all of the members of my group what they need to do so what I did to clear confusion was I gave a part to each person and checked up on them to see if they were fine with presenting that point. This made it clear who was saying what point. Also, another problem with the debate was that we often had to cut certain points off in order to meet within the time limit and this meant that I had to change up the order of what points people were saying. The people who got to say 2 points were switched with the people who didn’t speak yet in order for everyone to be included. If I was to redo this assignment, I would like to make sure that our points are more organized that it is within the frame time so we would not have the make any adjustments to the order of what points people presented. Overall, I felt very proud of this assignment as in the end, my group won the debate.

 

Here is the link to the script of the debate

Technology Debate