Category Archives: Humanities

Work done in humanities

Jun
21
2019

WW1: The Aquatic Front

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Hello there and welcome to my final humanities post for this year. This will also be my last humanities post for a long while as I am leaving the program. But I will probably come back for gr. 11 if it runs. Regardless I hope you enjoy this post about WW1.

In this unit we made a video about a specific topic in the category of WW1. This project was a lot more open ended then our other video projects. As we could pick the style of video we use. Regardless we still had a lot to do before we even chose our form.

One of those things was the novel study we had to do. To help us get a better understanding of the scale of WW1 we had to read a book.

There were 3 books that we could choose from. Warhorse, Generals die in bed, and Private Peaceful. I chose to read Warhorse as it sound the most appealing to me.

Warhorse is about the main character Joey who is a horse. He gets sold to the army where he goes on a epic journey to find his owner Albert. I can’t say much more without spoiling the book.

To show that we read the book we had to complete a role sheet each week and participate in book chats with other people who read the same novel.

I did not really like that we had to fill out role sheets about the book. I understand why we have to do it but I don’t like it. I would much prefer if we could talk about the book for a while. That would be much more interesting.

After we finished our books we had to do a final book reflection. There were 5 different options. I chose to do a photo essay. Before you go any further my reflection contains spoilers for the book. So you have now been warned.

While we were reading the book the more important part of this unit was taking place. That was the creation of our videos.

Our videos were required to have many things. Some of them were; an intro, music, and works cited. My topic was the War at Sea. I followed 5 main steps to make my video.

First I had to research my topic, the War at Sea. The research would become my base of the video. It also helped me understand what happened at sea during WW1.

 

Then came the video pitch form. Now that we had an idea about our topic and what story we were going to tell we could now pitch our video styles to Ms. Maxwell. I decided to go with the Indy Nidel style video. I picked this video style because I didn’t really like the other options. I hate drawing so an animation was off the table, and I have no idea how to make a stop motion.

 

Next I moved on to writing my screenplay. This stage is very important as this is where I decided what I’m going to say. It was important that I do this stage and not procrastinate it because it made filming the video a lot easier.

 

The last planning stage we did was the storyboard. This was helpful as it helped me plan out what I was going to film and what it would look like.

 

After all that I moved on the most important stages, filming and editing. I made many drafts for this video. I even had to change sets and re-film most of it. Here is my final video that I presented to the students at Cove Cliff.

Now let’s look into how I got there. To film I had to get my mom to help. My first draft was on a different set. Take a look.

As you can see the set was drastically worse and I didn’t have an intro or music. I also didn’t have a lot of images  to break up the face. This resulted in a pretty boring video. Using the feedback I quickly made a 2nd draft.

In this draft I re-filmed the video and added in more images. I did not have time to make an intro or add music for this draft but I put it in for the final one.

I only made 3 versions of this video mainly because of the time crunch I was on. Normally for a video we make at least 3-4 drafts before our final product. However as I said before we also went to Cove Cliff (an elementary school close by) to present our videos to a live audience.

Me at Cove Cliff showing kids my video.

 

Reflection 

This unit was a great way to end our humanities year. I learned lots about Indy nidel style videos and how to film/edit them. If I were to re-do this project I would definitely give myself more time to edit the video and add things like music and an intro earlier so that I can make less drafts. I loved the fact we got to go and present our videos to a live audience as it helped make sure the video was something I was proud of because I had to show it to people I don’t know.

Anyways humanities this year was great. I have one more post to do so stay tuned.

-Emerson

May
08
2019

A Minute of Canadian History

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Canada! A country that was only founded 152 years ago but already has such a rich history. In this project we had to create our own history minutes in groups of four. The time period for our videos was anything between 1800s and WW1. We were divided into 5 groups of four. Each group had a different topic that they had to focus on. My group consisted of Kiera, Taylor, and Luciano. Our topic was the Fur trade. We decided to focus on the voyageurs of Canada. Here was our end product.

Now we go though the process of getting an idea made into a video.

The Process 

Obviously the Fur Trade is a huge topic and narrowing it down can be a difficult challenge. One of the big rules for this project was that you could make your minute on a topic that had already been done. Fortunately Historica Canada (the company that makes history minutes) had not done anything about the fur trade so for us the door was open.

After a lot of research around what significant events happened during our time period after much debating we decided on the voyageurs of the fur trade. For those of you that don’t know the voyageurs were a group of elite First Nations men payed to move furs across Ontario and Quebec’s rivers.

We then plan out our video using a storyboard. After that we turned to the calendar to figure out a day that we could all film.

Then we went on the the filming stage. We ran into quite a few challenges while filming as it was very hard to make sure there were no houses or anything human built in the background. We also only had just over 2 hours to film everything as some people in our group had to go.

We then moved on to my favourite part of video making, the editing! I really enjoy editing because it’s all about precision. If one clip is a tenth of a second to long it could have drastic impact on the film and make it look very unprofessional.

Once I had put our clips together our first draft of our video was due.

As you can see the first draft was pretty solid but there was still quite a bit to change and fix for our second draft.

Here is our second draft. Some of the things we change were: we re-filmed all of Kiera and Taylor’s talking scenes as they were out of focus. We also changed transitions and extended/ cut a bunch of clips. We also add another scene.

This is our third and pretty much final video. For this draft we add music and I changed the font of the subtitles.

Here is our final video. It is the one featured at the beginning of this post. From the third draft we change the volume of the audio in different places. We also added a black screen at the beginning to add more effect. Also an outro at the end to tie it all together with the other videos.

After we made the video we then sent it to Historica Canada the company that create history minutes. We recently got feedback from Ryan Barnett and Joannne Archibald, who are important people at Historica. Here was their feedback.

 

Mar
14
2019

Rick Steves Would Be Proud 😀

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Hi everyone, welcome back to a new post. We recently complete an awesome unit in humanities! This unit was on travel videos. For this unit we went to Victoria and had an adventure through time. We visited many amazing sites such as the Royal B.C. Museum, B.C. Legislature, Ross Bay, and Chinatown! Our project for this field study was to make a video on a specific place. I decided to do my video on Chinatown. Here it is below.

It took a lot of effort to get that video to where it is. Many hours of editing. Let’s rewind to the beginning of our unit so that I can explain how it got there.

This unit was called the Wild West referring to the founding of B.C. and in particular Victoria. So for thoughs of you who were hoping for cowboys, this is unfortunately not the right place, but please read on.

Just like any other unit we of course had a driving question. For this unit the driving  question was How might we help visitors to Victoria connect with BC’s history? With this question at the for front of our minds we began to learn about travel videos.

There are many different things that make a travel video as well as there being many different types of travel videos. We watched a variety of different type so that we could understand what type of videos we should be making. Some of the videos we watched were:

Michael Palin:

Departures:

And Ms. Maxwell’s favourite RICK STEVES!

As you can see these videos are all very different and unique in their own way. For our videos we were told to aim for somewhat of a mix between Rick Steves and Michael Palin. The idea was to make the video interesting and immersive but still formal and informative.

We also learned about camera angles and how to film someone professionally. It all is based upon one main idea, the rule of thirds. The rule of thirds states that the person in the shot should be on one side and the other should be of the background.

See how Kyle is in about 1/3 of the shot and the other thirds are empty. This is how you should be in a video. We did some practice with the rule of thirds because practice makes perfect. To know if you have done the rule of thirds correctly you should be able to draw a grid over the person and they should be sitting on a vertical line and their eyes should be on a horizontal line.

Sorry if this is a bit confusing but I hope the images helped. If you have any question feel free to comment them down below.

Victoria

I don’t know if you know already but in PLP we go on field studies to places that will help enhance our learning. This video and what we were supposed to learn in this unit “coincidently” could both be enhanced with a field study to guess where? Yes, Victoria!

Our trip began with a early morning as we had to be at seycove at 5 AM. It was then a 2 hour ish ferry ride across the Georgia strait to Vancouver Island and lastly a 30 minute drive south to the capital itself Victoria.

Views from the ferry

We stayed at Hotel Zedd which is a pretty nice hotel not to far from the city centre.

Our time in Victoria was three days shorter then our previous field studies but we still had a blast. While we were there we went to many magical places such as Ross Bay cemetery, The Parliament Building, Royal B.C. museum and of course Chinatown! At the parliament building we got a tour from our MLA Jane Thornthwaite!

The entire time we were constantly shooting and filming B-roll. It wasn’t easy as we were on a very tight schedule and had very little time to film us talking.

Video drafts

Before I show you my drafts we should go though the criteria that these videos had to pass. Firstly it had to be between 3-4 minutes in length. Second it had to have an intro sequence. Thirdly there had to answer and/or relate to our driving question.

 

 

 

Feb
07
2019

James Douglas

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Today’s blog post is on ….. CANADIAN HISTORY!!!! That’s right, for the past weeks we have been hard at work learning about the things that lead of the confederation of Canada. For this unit our driving question was “How does power alter relationships between individuals and society”? Our project for this unit was an animation showing how a famous Canadian figure had power over a group of people (More on that later). Without further ado lets get right into it!

We started off this unit with a fun intro activity. This activity took us to Manitoba in the year 1870 when the Manitoba act was signed. As for what we did, well we were randomly given a slip a paper. This paper explained whether you were a Metis or a prospector. I was given the task of prospector. As a prospector you needed to buy as much land a possible using any means necessary, the only catch. We had a budget of 300$. The metis were trying to get as much for their land as possible.

In the end this activity showed me that the metis got the short end of the stick in the Manitoba act.

For this unit there were two main parts, the first was the animation and the second was Louis Riel.

1. Louis Riel

For this part of the unit we read a comic book. This book, written by Chester Brown is all about Louis Riel. In the book we learned about all the stuff he achieved, did wrong, and what happend to him in the end. The book also taught us about Riel’s impact on the Métis, CPR, and the creation of Manitoba. The book was split into 4 parts. Every week we had to read a part and write a paragraph about all the important events that happend in that part. If I had to give a review about this book I would give it a solid 8/10 stars. I really enjoyed this book. It had a good storyline and the visual were good. Where it lost points was in the plot as it was hard to follow in some parts. As well as it being written from one persons point of view because that effects the way characters are portrayed.

Debate

At the end of this book we had a debate. The debate was on wether Louis Riel was a hero or not. I ended up on the hero side.

Right from the beginning you could tell we had the upper hand. Nik and Kyle  kicked it off with an outstanding opening statement. Amelia, Jason and Fraser continued the steamroll with precise blows that kept them on their toes. Finally I delivered the killing blow and the debate had been won.

In all the debate was a lot of fun. You had to know louis Riel’s history quite well otherwise you got shredded to bits. I really enjoyed this debate as it brings out the competitive side in a lot of people as well as having lots of people participate. I really hope we get to do more of these in the future as I really enjoyed them.

2. The project

Using the power that Louis Riel had as an example, our task was to feature another famous persons power. The person I choose was James Douglas.

Before we could begin our animation we first had to learn about the person we chose. One fact that I learned about Douglas was, he important man as he founded Fort Victoria (now the capital of B.C.).

Once we had done our research we had to draw out our plan in the form of a storyboard. Once done that we could begin drawing our animation.

First draft

Final draft

Reflection

In the end I thought this unit was FANTASTIC! I enjoy almost every moment of it. I really liked how my animation turned out as well as the debate. One thing I realize in this project is that I need to time block a lot better because I was up really late finishing my animation. If I had time blocked it better I could of spread it out a lot more instead of doing it all in one night.

So ya the my shpeal for this post I hope you enjoyed

-Em

Nov
14
2018

A Metaphorical Machine!

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Welcome to a new post my readers. Today post is featuring 2 subjects; scimatics and humanities! In this project we learned about steampunk, the Industrial Revolution, metaphors, Revolutions, circuits, and scale diagrams. For this post I have divided it into three sections. The humanities side, the scimatics side and the actual video it’s self. Now let get it going with the humanities side!

Humanities

In this unit I learned a lot about steampunk and the Industrial Revolution. If you haven’t read my Steampunk post which defines steampunk and what it is you can check it out here. We started out this unit by learning about a man named Crane Brinton.

Brinton was an American historian who is best known for his book The Anatomy of a Revolution. Brintons theory was a guildline that almost all revolutions follow. In his theory he compares a revolution to a virus. His says that there are four stages to a revolution. I also compared his stages of a revolution to a story spine there is a exposition or incubation stage, next is the rising action or moderate stage, third is the climax or crisis stage, and finally is the conclusion or recovery stage.

After that we moved on to picking our revolutions. There were five different revolutions to pick from the options were: Russian, French, American, Chinese, and Haitian. I got put into the Chinese one with Jason, Kiera, and Sam. For some reason Ms. Maxwell our teacher decided to put all the asians into a group doing an Asia  revolution.

The requirements for this project were: there had to be at least 6 different metaphors, we had to fit all onto a 120 by 60 Cm board, and we had to incorporate a circuit.

The first thing we did about our revolutions was find out more about them. We had to make a timeline with all of our important events that happend in our revolution.

We then moved on to creating our metaphors. Because so much happens in a revolution and we can’t make every event into a metaphor we decided to pick the 6 most important events that happend in our revolution and turn them into metaphors. My group and I decided on these six events to be represented in our machine.

After we decided our metaphors we moved onto drawing. At this point I would like to remind you that this post is a multi subject one meaning we worked on this project in multiple subjects and got a grade for each one. At this moment I am going to switch to the scimatics side of things and come back to the humanities section in a bit. Thanks and hope you continue to enjoy this post.

Scimatics

While we were learning about history in humanities, in scimatics we were working on scale diagrams. For this we used a website called khan academy which you can find right here. I highly recommend it for anyone struggling in math because if you don’t understand the lesson there are videos that explain how to do it. Also its free!

Our work on scale diagrams was very interesting. Once I got the hang of it, it was quite easy to do. Anyways our first diagram blueprint that we drew was pretty good.

Once we had that done we began to learn about circuits. In this unit I learn a lot about electricity and how current flows. As well has how to get more power from the same amount of battery’s. We did quite a few worksheets and experiments that helped me understand and then further extend my knowledge about electricity.

As I said earlier we had to incorporate and make a circuit into one of our metaphors. Me and Sam were in charge of designing and making our circuit. We decided to make a parallel circuit an run a copper wire across the track so when the golf ball rolled through it would switch our circuit off.

The switch circled in black was a wire that ran across the track

Me and Sam not only had to design our circuit but we actually had to make it. Working as a team we had to sauter the wires and LEDs together so that they wouldn’t fall apart.

Now back to humanities

While me and Sam were hard at work making the circuit, Jason and Kiera were busy working on the machine its self. They had to spray paint and glue gun the tracks to the board. Everything was going along very well until we ran into a problem. Our original plan for the scale did not work so we ended up remodelling the scale so that it was easier to make.

It took us about 1 and a half weeks to make and build our machine. Then we spent another 2-3 days repeatedly making test runs to make sure that it worked. After we did our full run through we start making our video.

The video that we ended up with was very good. My group and I decided that me and Sam did a lot of the building of the machine so Jason and Kiera did most of the work editing the video. For science we also had to make a final blueprint and circuit diagram which you can find below.

Now with out further ado here is our final machine video hope you enjoy.

Conclusion

Refleting back on this unit there were many things that I learned. From the revolutions to circuits to even how to build and improvise if something doesn’t work. I really though I increased my knowledge on many things including how a revolution happens, what happend in The Industrial Revolution and how circuits and electricity work as well.  I really enjoyed this unit and I can wait to write about the next. Until next time 👋

-Em

Jun
18
2018

Colonizing in a tempest!!

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Hello everyone welcome to another post. This is my last gr.8 humanities post 😢 I hope you enjoy.

Our last unit this year was colonization!! In this unit we learned about New France, the colonization of North America, Shakespeare and our final project for this year was 🔥🔥🔥 (you’ll see why later) now let’s get started.

We started off this unit with (just like most units) getting put into groups. In my group was Keira, Izzy, and Ben. Once this was done we moved on to Shakespeare. The play we studied was the Tempest. It was of course written by Shakespeare. To make this play we were given an app that had all the the lines and a summary of every part of every act in the play. Our other very challenging task was to set the play in New France. So of course we had to learn about it to be able to incorporate it into the play.

The first thing we looked at in this unit was colonization. We looked at a comic that showed the steps to colonizing a place and how to get the locals on your side.

These are the four steps of colonization. The steps are

1. Reconnaissance

2. Invasion

3. Occupation

4. Assimilation

If you want an explanation of what each word means read the comic for more.

We then moved on to New France it’s self. We learned about the pyramid of power and the different types of people living in New France. The rankings are below.

 

 

May
20
2018

Exploring the new world!!!

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Hello world how you doing today? Today I’m writing about exploring is the 16th century. The purpose of this unit was to understand why explorers were sailing in search of new land.

The explorer I chose was Henry Hudson and the first thing we had to do was some research about our explorers to get to understand them better. The research sheet looked a lot like this.

Now your probably thinking PLP is supposed to be slightly more difficult then regular school and yes I know that research is pretty easy but we had a lot more going on on top of this.

At the same time we were researching our explorers we were also doing a novel study on comics. There were 4 different types of comics and each group was assigned a different genre of comic expach week the different genres of comics were Tintin, Anti-Hero, New Age, and Superhero. At the end of each week we had to fill out a comic chart and discuss the genre of comic with our groups.

My group made up of Taylor, Keira, Gabby, Aedan, and I all had basically the same thoughts on all the comics and genres.

On top of all that we also had to make our own comics. This is the reason why we were doing a novel study on comics. You can see mine later on in this post.

One not so great thing that happened was that Ms Willemse was in Cuba during this unit so we had a sub. Our sub was really great and she was very informative but she was not Ms. Willemse.

Now the reason we were doing all of this is because the final project for this unit was we had to present to the king and queen to convince them to fund me for an  expedition. Luckily my friends filmed me so I could show it to you people.

Reflection

I learned a lot in this unit like how to use a lot of different apps like superimpose and many others. I also learned a lot about the navigational tool used in that time period as well as how much trading impacted countries around the world.

Thank you for reading and I’ll see u in the next one 👋.

Mar
09
2018

Poetry

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Hello everyone I have an interesting blog post for today. This one is on poetry. Now if you didn’t know I’m not a big fan of poetry, But I decided to give it a shot. In this unit we covered all the different types of poems such as ABC, haiku, and metaphors just to name a few. We also had to keep a page that included all of the definitions that we learned. On top of all this we had to write one of each of the poems we learned and put them all into a book, and to make things even harder all the poems had to be about aspects of our worldview.

 

My poetry terms and definitions!

What I learned

In this unit I learned a lot about poetry. I also deepened I understanding of how to book creator and unfortunately I am still not a fan of poetry. I gave it a good go but it’s still one of my least favourite things about school.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see u in the next one.

Jan
12
2018

A religious worldview

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Just before the break ended we were studying religion and worldview in humanities.

Now if you are reading this as a religious person please don’t feel offended if the information is incorrect because I only really focused on the Muslims so please don’t get mad.

So now onto the interesting part. We started of with us being put into groups of four. My group was composed of Sam, Gabby, and Fraser. Then we learned one very key vocabulary word for this unit. Worldview- a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world. It can then be divided into seven main categories geography, knowledge, economy, values, society, beliefs, and time.

Once we had that all down we went into the religion part. First we were tasked with making a world religion chart about all the religions.

While that was going on we also had to create infographics about a specific religion the groups were Christianity, Islam, Jewdism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. My group had rotten luck and got the muslims. Now wait I am not saying that the Muslims are bad, the reason is because we had to ask an Imam questions 2 days after we got the assignment.

So that was the next part we went to the each of the religions gathering places and each group had to interview the leader to understand more about that religions worldview. So now we have a script that we were going to follow but of course I messed up and we had to scrap it. But I’ll still put it in because why not.

So then we started focusing on our infographic. As well as going on 4 other field trips to see the other religions.

The mosque

The synagogue

The Hindu temple

The Christian church

The Buddhist monks

The Sikh gurdwara

Then my group of Gabby, Fraser, and Sam stared focusing on the infographic.

This was our first draft that we made. It was made in keynote don’t know why but that’s why it’s sideways. So its really bad but its a first draft so don’t judge.

So now we changed to pages and changed a lot of stuff. The background the colour and icons are all new from the last draft.

So this is our third draft and all we did was change one colour.

At last we came out with this amazing beauty. It’s easy to read and understandable. We changed the  flow of the page. And added lots of icons plus some fun facts.

Now we had groups for all the religions we study except Hinduism sorry but here are their info graphics.

Thanks for reading

-Emerson

Oct
23
2017

An Amazing Advertisement

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In Humanities we started of with an advertising unit. To start we were put into groups of four and were told to call a business in Deep Cove and ask if we could meet with them to discuss designing an ad for them. My group (Kyle, Lucy, Taylor and me) were lucky. The first business we called which was the Cove Creek Gallery said yes. After we interviewed them we went to work designing our ads.

 

This was my first draft. After Mrs Willemse grilling almost everyone’s ads we started draft #2. Some of the critique I got was the background was plain and the visual elements were confusing. So taking all that into consideration I came up with this.

ad draft 2.0

As you can see the ad has changed dramatically. I tried going with a different approach but it didn’t turn out the way I expected. So it was back to the drawing board for the ad.

But right around the time of our third and final ad draft we were introduced to comic life 3 an app for making comics. So my third draft looked like this.

Draft 3

So you can see vast improvement. But enough of local businesses it was time to step it up. On our Oregon field trip one of our assignments was to interview a Oregon business and design ads for that place. We stayed with the same groups, so my group pulled Hatfield Marine Science Center as our business to interview. The person we interviewed  name was Athena and she was so nice. She answer all our questions and gave us good advice on what to change about our pre designed ads. Oh yeah I forgot to show you reader it. Here it is

Ad draft 1 Oregon

As you can see its not bad at all its not even close to being do but for a first draft it good. But she gave me some great feed back. Athena said to change the background colour to orange to match their logo. Also to mention that its located behind the Oregon State University. So here’s ad draft 2 for Oregon.

 

Oregon draft 2

So it’s definitely better but in case you were wondering the background isn’t orange because all the orange colours were to bright or didn’t go with the ad at all.  So we got some more critique from Mrs. Willemse. Some feedback I got was there was too much white in my ad so I had to fix that and that the behind Oregon State University whould be gone and to take away the word at. So here’s draft 3

Oregon ad draft 3

So there is definitely less white and the spellings fixed. But I still had a bunch to do.

This was my final ad draft after a ton of improvements I came out with this amazing ad.

So that’s it after a ton of revision and improvements the ad was final done. Now reflecting back I would payed more attention to the small little details so that I didn’t have to make any more drafts.

Thank you reader for reading all of this post see you again.