For my PYP exhibition, I decided to do Chinese Calligraphy. I chose this because I'm not a very neat writer and I don’t like to wait and do things slowly. In the 5 - 6 weeks of exhibition, I had a lot of trouble since the last part was at home. I struggled with planning attempts but I overcame that and got every attempt done in a good quality.

Some attitudes I learnt were patience, organization and time management. For example, I don’t like to do calligraphy because it takes a long time to write one character and I lose focus before the exhibition. During the process of slowly and steadily writing a character, I’m now more focused and patient with every character I write in calligraphy text.

My Artistic piece was a picture of my hand holding a pen and acting as a mountain with Chinese words. The characters in English mean calligraphy, patience, time management and perseverance inside the arrows. I’m the one who is climbing the mountain and facing the challenges. The things that inspired me were the challenges I got through.

I connect with my artistic piece because I’m Chinese and this is the skill that could represent Chinese culture. It also connects to all the things I did and all the successes and the challenges I faced.

For my PYP exhibition I focused on time management. I chose this because my teachers often tell me that this is something that I need to work on. I also chose time management because I am a bit of a perfectionist. I think it is one of the main reasons why I take a long time to complete work. To improve, I chose to do some mini challenges over the 5 weeks that we had. Some of the challenges included, writing a short story, or making some cards for my friends. Time management is an important skill because we all use it everyday. For example, I will need to have good time management in high school to complete homework on time. One thing I learnt throughout the exhibition is that there is a fine line between getting things done on time, and to a high enough standard. Of course I had some ups and downs, but overall I believe that I improved a lot. I improved because I found that I was getting work done faster than I normally would.

My artistic piece represents what I did for exhibition. The picture of the iPad represents where I did my work. I chose this image because I did my exhibition digitally. The clock represents what I did for my exhibition; time management. There are four hands on the clock that have words on them. These words are strategies that helped me develop my time management skills. They are some of many important strategies for good time management. All the other thinner hands on the clock are times. This represents the different amount of time spent on my exhibition. The clock is not centred, but is closer to the end of the page. This represents where I am on my time management journey. I put the scale at the bottom because that represents my journey. The start of the scale is where I was, the end is where I want to be. The mountains at the back represent the rocky journey I have had so far.

This year I chose to do interior design for my exhibition. I chose interior design because I need to work on a lot of skills but the big ones were, organisation and research skills. These ones were a struggle for me because I did not organise my things very well and I didn’t put any effort into my research. Interior design helped me with this because I had to organise my room and also research products and strategies.

The struggles I had were I knew nothing about design. I did not know how to design a room or even a closet. Over the weeks that I have studied design, I have now become much better than before. I now know most of the principles of design (including colour schemes, symmetry, balance and height). The biggest struggle of all was moving back to Australia during PYP Exhibition. That was really hard because It was really stressful moving.

This term was very tough, not just because I had to learn a new skill that I knew nothing about. I was also going through an international move and adjusting to the thought of a new life in Australia. Exhibition has not just taught me research and organisation skills, it has also taught me resilience and responsibility. For example, if you don’t get your work done there will be consequences. The one thing that I took away from the exhibition was that if you work hard, you get good results.