Mission Topic, Purpose, and Hypothesis

Have you ever looked at the walls in your school and they’ve been blank? Have you ever wondered what students are working on and have heard visitors asking the sme question? If so our mission is to fix that. Our mission is to put up bulletin boards up around our school. Bulletin boards are a great way to show off students work. The purpose of our mission is to put up bulletin boards around our school to inform visitors what students are learning. It will also inform students about what other students are working on. Our hypothesis is that if bulletin boards are put up then visitors and students will be able to see work students have done and what they are learning.

Real World Skills I’ve Learned

I have learned quite a few skills from this project so far. There was a great skill that I already knew, but improved at. It was researching. I was researching grants that we could apply for and places that could donate bulletin boards to us. The first time few times I tried our group didn’t qualify for those grants. I then started typing it differently and found grants we qualified for. I can use this in real life in case a need to find a toy my kid wants or if I need to find a hotel for vacation.

Another skill I learned was social skills. In order to put up the boards our group had to talk to the principal. We needed to get approval from her to put up bulletin boards. I was scared our principal wouldn’t approve. The whole group talked to her and found out she loved the project. In real life I will need this to talk to people and explain something that needs approval even if I am scared.

The third skill I learned was talking to professionals. In order to talk to professionals you need to sound professional yourself. Me and another project member were calling Ace hardware store to see if they could donate bulletin boards to us. Since the person I would be talking to was a professional, that meant I needed to sound a bit formal and not use the word “like”. I’ll use this skill in real life if I ever need to talk to a big company or if I’m appling for a job.

The last skill I learned was to explain something thoroughly. It has always been hard for me do to that. I decided that for this project I needed to try really hard. I was helping with an e-mail that would be sent to the principal, the workshop teacher, and any other person we had to e-mail. In the e-mail we needed to explain what our project was clearly so they would understand. I wrote most of that and I explained throroughly what the project was and why we were doing this. I’m really glad I finally learned this because in the real world there will be many things I will have to explain in writing.

Challenges We/I Encountered

There were a few challenges our group faced. One of them is that we didn’t communicate. It made it really hard to know what each person was doing. Another challenge was that it was really hard to find a grant or a donor that we could apply to. It was a challenge because there were many grants we didn’t qualify for. Also, a hard challenge was that we were all a bit disorganized. This made it hard to find research we had written down. The last challenge was that we didn’t write down what needed to be done. Since, we didn’t write that down we never new what we had to do and we didn’t acommplish much.

Solutions We Tried Out

Some solutions were to talk before we even started. This helped us know what to do. Instead of searching for grants we looked at hardware stores and found ACE. We are now getting 3 boards from there. In order to become more organized we decided to keep everything in folders and to label the paper or document. Our final solution was to write down everything that we still need to do and prioritize. This helped us know what really needed to be done.

Next Steps

Our next steps our to get the bulletin boards. We also need to find out the building regulations of putting things on the walls. We are going to talk to Mr. Gaines, the building engineer, and find out. Also, we are going to email all GW2 teachers asking if they will take care of the boards. This way the bulletin boards we always have work on them.

Favorite Part of the Process

My favorite part of the project was being independent. I like this because I love to be on my own but still have people for help. It was really enjoyable to not follow teachers directions. We got to find things on our own. I’m a person that likes to do creative projects and this was one.