We recently wrapped up our latest socials project on confederation and Canadian heritage and I have left it feeling pretty confident in the subject matter. We took a look into the forming of Canada as a nation and how it became what it is today. The main part f this project was the Heritage Minutes that we did. These were based off 1 minute videos made by Historica Canada which are used to inform people of great and influential people or events that were a part of Canadian heritage. We watched many of these and looked at how to actually make one, eventually making some ourselves. I enjoyed working on mine with my group and putting it out for everyone to see.

The overall learning in this project was us researching confederation and Canadian history. We interviewed the chief editor from Historica Canada and learned how to make Heritage Minutes. We learned about John A Macdonald and how he and many others brought the British controlled provinces into one nation and we looked at some short story’s involving Canadian history.

As for the bulk of the project, We went through multiple stages of writing scripts making rough drafts and revising our videos until they were complete. We were in groups of four and I did this project with Luca, Tamara and Lucas. For the topic of our heritage minute we decided to choose Big Bear, a very important First Nations leader who tried to keep his land and co exist with the settlers.

We spent a lot of time researching him and what he did throughout his life. When we went into producing the video we where not able to actually act in front of the camera ourselves because of the actors we would need for that to happen. Instead we decided to tell the story through one of our group members writing a letter and we would have all of us narrate it.

Sticking with the criteria for a heritage minute we made the video under one minute long and made sure to include the end card which was made by Luca O. We then presented all of these videos to the rest of the class to get critique for our second draft. After revising the videos we invited another socials nine class to come and watch our videos. They left our final critique and everyone went home to finish the third and final draft. You can watch our final video here.

This was one of my favorite projects this year and I had fun (about as much fun as you can have while working on a school project) doing this.