9th Grade — Semester Portfolio & Review

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

Flip through your work from this semester. Which single piece are you most proud of, and why?

🎯 Today's Big Question

How does everything we've learned this semester fit together, and what are we most proud of?

📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To

Select their strongest pieces of analog work from the semester for a simple portfolio.
Write a short reflection connecting at least 2 units (CTE/career readiness, client & designer, image vocabulary, elements & principles).
Review key vocabulary from the semester through a review game.

🧰 What You'll Need

All semester work (folders/portfolios)
Portfolio cover sheet (paper or simple Google Doc)
Vocabulary review game materials (index cards or a class set of the semester's terms)

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Curate & Reflect

Do Now (5 min): which single piece are you most proud of, and why? Curate (20 min): select 4-6 strongest pieces and arrange them into a simple portfolio (folder or photographed into a Doc/Slides if computers are available).
Write reflection (15 min): a short reflection connecting at least 2 units.
Share (5 min).

Day 2: Review & Celebrate

Do Now (5 min): list 3 vocabulary terms you still want to review.
Vocabulary review game (25 min): whole-class game using terms from across the semester.
Gallery walk (10 min): final gallery walk of everyone's portfolios.
Closing reflection (5 min).

🖨️ Print Your Handout

Word, picture, and definition for today's vocabulary, plus a place to write and draw. Available in English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese.

Day 1: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH
Day 2: EN · ES · FR · AR · ZH

🖥️ Today's Slide Deck

Short, on-the-board pacing slides — project these to follow along. (The full details are in the handout above, not here.)

Day 1

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

Day 2

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

📚 Key Words

Portfolio: A curated collection of a designer's best work used to show skills to others.
Reflection: Thinking and writing back on your own learning and growth.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Portfolio + written reflection scored with a rubric: pieces selected show growth, reflection makes a real connection between units, not just a summary.

Exit Ticket: What's one thing you learned this semester that surprised you?

📊 Before You Leave

Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.

Class Check-In

📤 How You Submit This — For Credit

Your physical projects don't stay in the classroom past the day you finish them -- you're responsible for your own completed work, the same way you'd be responsible for it in any job. The one exception is your class notebook: it has its own designated spot in the room (ask your teacher exactly where), and most students leave it there day to day -- but it's yours, so if you'd rather keep it with you or bring it home to study from, that's your call. Either way, always know where your own notebook actually is. Before a finished physical piece leaves your hands for good: ask your teacher for one of the classroom cameras, photograph your finished (or in-progress) work, then plug that camera's SD card into a classroom computer and upload the photo into your portfolio folder. That uploaded photo, with a short caption, IS your submission for credit -- the photo is what gets kept and graded, not the physical piece.

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week (e.g. every Friday, or your class's last meeting of the week), photograph or save your best finished or in-progress piece from that week into your portfolio folder (a physical folder for now, or a Google Drive folder once one is set up) with a 1-2 sentence caption: what it is, and one skill it shows. In Grade 10 this becomes your Google Sites portfolio -- keep adding to it weekly from here on so you're not trying to reconstruct a whole semester of work at the end.

✍️ Example description for your Google Sites portfolio (fill in YOUR blanks -- don't just copy this):

For this piece, I made ______________ (name what you made) for “Semester Portfolio & Review.” This project asked: “How does everything we've learned this semester fit together, and what are we most proud of?” I used Portfolio by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🎓 ACP Exam Prep

This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 1: Working in the Design Industry

🔗 Want to Learn More?

No extra links for this lesson.

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same reflective-writing skill an English class asks for in an end-of-semester reflection essay.

Career Connection: A real, organized portfolio is the single most important asset for every entry-level job listed across the Careers hub.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Publish your semester portfolio somewhere real (a free website, a PDF, a printed booklet) instead of leaving it in a folder. Start here: pick your platform — Behance, a free Carrd site, a PDF — before you touch a single project file, so you know what sizes to export at.
Write one process-narrative caption for your strongest piece, explaining the problem, your choices, and what you'd do differently. Start here: pick your single strongest piece first, then write three bullet points — problem, choice, what you'd change — before turning them into prose.