Hi everyone!

I have just finished my last humanities project in grade 8, and it was really fun! During this project we learning about New france, and what their daily life was like. The driving question for this project was, How can artifacts teach us about settlement, people, and life in New France? Our end product was going to be a short story, that is inspired by an artifact of our own choosing. Before creating our story, we had a lot of learning and work to do.

To start off this project, we practiced communicating our ideas about an object. We choose something in our house or around our neighbourhood, that we thought represented our COVID-19 experience, and would be seen as an artifact of archeological interest. For this milestone, I chose to write about a loaf of bread. I chose to write this milestone, because I find that I communicate my ideas a lot better when I write them down. For this milestone I also had to take a photo of the artifact which you can see down below.

 

 

After practicing our communication skills we had to learn about what life in New France was actually like. To do this we also got to make a character that could play a possible role in our story. For this, I wrote a letter so I could fully describe my characters daily life. I decided I wanted to learn more about the Filles de Roi, because I found there role in society ver interesting. I also wanted to learn more about how they felt in there role, were they content with living that way, did they want more, or was it a struggle at some times? This is what I wanted to learn about my character, so I could use how she felt about living in new france in my story.

Once I had my character and her backstory, I had to find an artifact! This was the fun part because I got to go through virtual museums and look for an artifact that I found interesting and fitting for my character. The artifact we chose had to be evidence of how life in New France was. The artifact I chose was a locket with a painting of three children inside, to me this artifact represents the love and loss of children. The locket I chose also had human hair on it, which was common back the to mourn the dead. This was a huge part of my inspiration for my story!

Our character and artifact were now set, and it was time to move onto Writing the story! I read a lot, so I had so many ideas on how I wanted to write my book, different styles, different perspectives, and some creative parts that I thought would be interesting to add to my story. When I started writing, a lot of my ideas just started fitting together, writing isn’t something I do often, so it was really nice to have my book come together pretty well. I think writing the story was one of my favourite parts of the project. I enjoyed being able to write a creative story while trying to communicate how my artifact was a piece of evidence of life from New France.

 

When I had finished writing my story, I had to put it into an app called bookcreator. This app allows you to take the writing and format it into something that looks more like a book. Once we finished that, our book was complete! Down here you can click on my book and read it, I hope you enjoy.

During this project I learned a lot about creative writing, and how it can be a useful skill.I also learned a lot about New France and how they lived, I learned how we have evolved and built new technology and have new beliefs. A big one I learned about was the way people treat women, back then they were just thought of something that made babies and were below men, today though we are thought more of equals and have jobs other than staying home and taking care of children. I learned a lot of this through my character and through the artifact I chose. Every object has a story and a past, and while we may not know the whole truth or even close to the truth we can learn from small clues the objects leave. Even if it is just the material the object is made of, an artifact can teach you a lot. I’m really glad I got to do this project, I enjoyed learning about life in New France and writing a short story on it.

 

”Be confident, not certain.”

–Eleanor Roosevelt