The annual tulip festival a beautiful show of affection between two former British colonies. Every year in may tulips are sent from the Netherlands to Canada. In 2016 over one million tulips were on display in the Canadian Capital. The tulip is the Netherlands national flower. This demonstration is to show appreciation for Canadians role in liberating the Netherlands during the Second World War.

Our class was asked to research a topic about WW2 that we looked into during class and create an inquiry question. Here is my inquiry question- Was there a long lastin
g change in relations between te average civilian of the Netherlands and Canada and is their still a cherished relationship today?

The relationship between Canada an the Netherlands affect the average Canadian in some way. Today there is about one million people of Dutch decent who live in Canada. One being my teacher, but Ms. Willemse is the odd man out when it comes to Dutch occupations. The Dutch have brought many of their expertise to Canada ecspecially in agricultural. The Dutch and Canadians also have an exceptionally strong military alliance. They buy and sell many military equipment for example the Netherlands sold Canada 100 Leopard tanks. Canada and Netherlands also fought together in Afghanistan.

Canada and the Netherlands are both founding members of NATO and many other peacekeeping treaties.

The two countries also have strong trade realations. The Netherlands is the 8th largest destination for Canadian exports.

Both Canada and the Netherlands promote studying and working in the other country. They do this by offering special visas that make it easy to study and find work. This demonstrates respect for each other’s culture and practices because they hope those who studied and worked abroad bring their knowledge back to their country.

In some way shape or form most Canadians are effected by the relationship with the Netherlands. This realtion may be culturally, business or military and is appreciated by most Canadians as we help each other become wealthier, safer and happier countries. So to answer my inquiry question there is a cherished relationship between Canadians and Dutch wether we realize it or not.

We are moving forward with world history in class and we have just done World War 1 so what’s next? World War 2 of course. We just had one horrible and costly war so let’s have another one. To research World War 1  we created a journal entry to delve deeper into the life of a soldier. For World War 2 we are doing the same thing.

I had to choose a soldier from Canada. With the help of this website I could easily find a soldier. The website also provided a lot of detailed primary sources of wartime documentation.

The soldier I choose was Beazley Vincent Williams. I will show you my journal entry then explain my descions I made to configure my entry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were few things I found in the documentation that I used to structure my entry.

First I found that one of his passions was reading.

 

Second I saw he was religious.

 

 

Thrid I discovered his occupation.

 

Finally I found that he had a wife and a child at the time of his death.

 

 

In my journal entry I tried to portray the thoughts of a religious soldier struggling with the evil actions of Hitler. I refer to Hitler as the devil and the world he created  as hell. I also demonstrate the destruction of France by saying its other worldly and painting the picture of the destruction of towns.

The biggest difference I found between the life of a soldier in  World War 1 and 2 is the technology and the hatred of different ideologies. Communism, Fascism and Capitalism are all so vastly different I could see why it was so hard to see eye to eye with the enemy. These ideological differences allowed hate to spread like wildfire between the different alliances. The best way to describe the role of Ideology in World War 2 is that it played the same role religion played in other wars.

 

I have been assigned to develop an inquiry question on the topic of the 1920s in Canada or the Great Depression. I was thinking about the most interesting things about what we have learned. By far the most action packed event was the day or two after the stock market crash. Descriptions of people losing everything in the market and some people in so much distress they committed suicide. We also read a short story by Sinclair Ross called The Lamp at Noon and the did a great job of representing what the life of the average Canadian was like during the depression. So I concluded it would be an interesting project to write a short story of the stock market crash. My inquiry question was : What was it like for those who were rich before the depression and whats was the diffrence between the rich and poor? Here is my short story about James Riordan a real rich person who was affected by the stock market crash.

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Conscription is Not Fair! This line still rings in my head as I am writing this two week after the exhibition. Why is conscription not fair? Well this is the question my group answered and portrayed at this immersive flight exhibition. Our assignment was to create an immersive walk through experience with the topic of conscription in Canada during 1917. The conscription forced men in Canada to go to war if they could fight, even against their will. This created some problems though as many Canadians didn’t want to fight in the war especially the French Canadians. The French Canadians didn’t feel French or British but Québécois. The Québécois felt they had nothing to do with the war as they didn’t feel connected to France or England leading them to prominent protests. The French protest is what we made the bread and butter of our experience as it was easy to represent and gave a little pop to our project. We used the protest as a climax to our story and built everything else around that.

First Station

First we had Matthew our Canadian sergeant and our two Québécois engage in some heated banter. We made sure we established the major point that no one wanted join the war because it was dangerous and that the Québécois really didn’t want to join the war and all they had to do was say no.

Second Station

Second we had my part which was a political speech which demonstrated the unrest within the Québécois people as Borden made enlistment mandatory. This lead to a semi engaged protesters protesting against conscription.

Next we had Anatolia describe the roles women had in this debacle and show how Borden leveraged the new found women vote to get conscription past.

 

 

Our final piece of our emersive experience ended where it started with Matthew getting people to join the war and now with conscription passed the people had no choice but to join the war. But once again Matthew is foiled by the sly Québécois as Cashel and Zak explain the large loop hole that allowed around 80% of men to be exempt of the war because of occupation or religious belief.

 

Overall I think our exhibition went well as we were able to tell the not so interesting story of conscription in a more interesting way. Our group was able to keep the audience engaged and having both Cashel and Zak as narrators/tour guides really helped keep the story as one piece instead individual sections. We could of improved on our scenery a bit, but other than that everything went as well or better than I thought.

Hanford Washington. You might be saying “Where the hell is that?”.
Well it’s in the very bottom right of Washington, away from everything.
Why am I talking about Hanford you might ask, well that’s were plutonium was made for 60 000 nuclear weapons.

Currently we are studying WWI and WWII so this was a perfect field trip to enhance our learning.
Our class took a trip to Hanford but we took a few stops along the way. We drove through Washington, to Portland, Oregon, then went back up to Hanford, Washington. This trip was an awesome experience. All the Flight trips give you a great opportunity to learn hands on.

We saw not just one but two nuclear reactors, the Oregon and Washington environment, and the once great Hanford nuclear complex that is nothing more than museum now. This trip was an awesome experience to stand in the foot steps of history.

 

Hanford Washington was one of three major facilities of the Manhattan Project the other two being Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Hanford was developed to create plutonium. To create plutonium you need a reactor and our class went to that first full scale reactor to produce plutonium. I went and stood at the B Reactor the forefront of science at the time. It was a place that changed the world forever, and I was standing there looking at Enrico Fermi’s and America’s Reactor that created the plutonium for one of the bombs that ended WWII.

I didn’t just go to the B-Reactor and soak in all this information and keep it for myself. My group members and I have created a video on 5 topics that tell the story of the B-Reactor. Our video is on the topics of the science behind the reactor. My section focuses on the physical reactor itself. I talk about the massive magnitude of the reactor and try to explain some the physics behind the reactor. My 4 other group members were Nash, Maria, Cash and Tom you can read about their learning experience on their blogs.

This project was an improvement on previous documentaries I have done, but there could of been a lot more improvements. For this video we were able to get a lot of good footage of the reactor in the limited time and restrictions. All said there was some flaws in the filming. A lot of clips were to specific. What we should of gotten is just more general images that we could use for any scene instead of trying to get the perfect shot. Our project would of been better off if we took big panning shots of the reactor, the cooling system, and the outside of the building. It’s really hard to plan out what exactly you are going to say before the trip, because you don’t know what you are going to see exactly. Some positives of our footage was the interviews of the experts. We got them to answer a lot of questions so we had a lot of footage to choose from. I tried to encourage the guides to say things I already knew the answers to so I could get some specific sound bites, but it didn’t work out as well as I would of liked it. Next time I will develop my question keeping this in mind. Without further a due my groups video.

(Video)

Both the project and field trip were chock-full of learning opportunities. I learned so much about the Manhattan Project, Government Power and the narrative of atomic science that changed life forever.

 

Two months, seventy-nine days, sun and fun gone in a flash. I will give you a peek into my joyous summer. We start with a 10 hour drive from my home to peaceful Prince George with me and my cousin doing cabin things.

This trip was highlighted by the creation of a six foot crossbow. Yes a six foot crossbow! To create the machine we used an industrial rubber band as my power. We used 2×4’s to create the cross and drilled it all together with screws. The most tricky part of creation was the launch mechanism which we ended up using a bent nail to catch the string. Which we then spun around to release the string and fire the machine.

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We did multiple attempts trying to launch the arrow as far as possible.

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We where able to get it to fire to around the yellow slide.

Had some fun with it too and tried to launch a golf ball. I had the idea because my grandfathers good friend would hit golf balls off the deck almost across the lake. His name was Bryan so that’s who I named the machine after.

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First attempt was a major fail but, we improved our design.

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Our project turned out well but, this wasn’t a problem free creation. We had a rubber band break on me so we had to use different size rubber bands which made the arrow fire slightly to the left. We hope to improve on my creation next year by buying the same size rubber bands and making the entire thing bigger. 10ft?Also We need to enhance the arrow, it was light so it lost velocity quickly I will need to add a metal tip to the arrow next year.

Now this was just a peek into the keyhole of my summer where I also played basketball went to L.A, Hornby Island and Thetis Island. My summer is now over but I didn’t regret one moment.