Kshfdlascnvksgelgjmvfngldljgeb!! That was a fast forward through all of the silly jibber jabber I always include in the beginning, I was to lazy, it’s early in the morning guys!! Anyway, we just finished our last unit of the year, the grand finale of PLP 8, and to be honest, it has been a great year. But I explained all about how my year has been and what I have learned in my last post, “tPOL”, so you can check that out. In this unit, we learned all about Shakespeare and New France, but there was a twist, we actually combined the two. Now, you are probably wondering how that’s possible, two completely different subjects coming together, but of course we did it, we always do. So here I am to tell you about our story.

NEW FRANCE

The first thing we learned about was New France. You would probably never guess that New France, judging by it’s name, wasn’t actually in France, it was the first settlement in Canada. That’s why people over in Quebec speak French!! Fun fact of the day! But lets start from the beginning. People started coming from all over the world in search of a quicker and more efficient route to the Spice Islands, but instead they found that land of forests and cold, Canada and North America. It was a bit of a disappointment at first until they started to actually look around. This land had valuable things they had never seen before. So over the years they made a settlement called New France which is now somewhere around Quebec.

The explorers didn’t realize until they arrived that this land wasn’t undiscovered, people actually lived there. These were the First Nations people. The Europeans slowly took over the land, creating settlements, this is called colonialism. Here is a short comic that tells you about it! is I explained it, well, you know how long this post would be.

Once the land had been taken over and settlements had been made, it was time to start living a normal life. There were many different people with different jobs. There was the sovereign council, the clergy, seigneurs, and the habitants, filles du roi, coureur de bois, and country wives. The sovereign council included people such as the governor, the intendant and the bishop. They were mostly in charge of daily life in New France. The things like laws, the church, the people etc. The clergy included nuns and priests who help with the church as well as medical care and education, the seigneurs are men that were granted a large portion of land by the king to rent smaller portions out two willing farmers called habitants. People such as habitants, filles du roi, coureur de bois, and country wives were the lowest class, they lived ordinary lives but were still an important part of society.

The next big thing that happened in New France were the fur trading companies. The biggest most famous one, that you have probably heard of is the Hudson Bay Company.

The HBC did very well in it’s time and as you can see, still does. They set up factories and forts alongside main rivers that flowed into the bay, giving them good ports and travel routes to trade along. The land that they had, called Rupert’s land, was given to them by the king, therefore no one else could trade on it and use their forts, this is a huge advantage for them. Their system was to collect furs in the summer when the First Nations would come and bring the pelts, and then fro the rest of the year they would treat the furs and send them back to Europe to be sold and made into different things.

 

But remember, back in the day, there was no such things as money, so the HBC would trade different things depending on the size and quality of the pelt, with the indigenous people’s, allowing them to gain new European technologies. Now that you have met the HBC, I will now introduce you to the NWC. The North West company was the Hudson Bay company’s main competition. They had a much better system in which they would come to the First Nations instead of waiting for them to come to them. Although the only land they had was the land surrounding the HBC, they still did pretty well. Their one disadvantage though, was that they’re land was not owned by the king, therefore the HBC won the competition for top fur trading company and took over the NWC.

As you can see, New France was doing pretty well. But every thing that is good has to come to an end! This time, was a time of wars and fighting. A lot of fighting over the land. A result of one of the wars between England and France, was the British conquest of a French colony called the Acadians. There was more of “It’s my land, no it’s mine”, and Britain continued to take over parts of New France, so the French had less and less places to go, the British even ended up taking over Acadia as well, deporting the Acadians. But the French didn’t stop fighting for the land. There was a war they called the seven years war. This is because the war lasted for seven years, but in the end, Britain won and took over most of North America.

THE TEMPEST

In 1611, which is a completely different time period then when New France was around, a man named Shakespeare lived. Now, some of you may know of him he is a kind-of famous poet I guess?? Just joking, Shakespeare was, and still is, one of the most world renowned poets/play writers in history. He wrote many plays such as “Romeo and Juliet”, “Hamlet”, and “Julius Ceaser”. But one of his last ones he ever did was one called the “Tempest”.

See the source image

The Tempest is about a man/woman named Prospero and his daughter, Miranda  who live on an island. Prospero used to be the duke of Milan, until he was spending too much time practicing magic and not enough time ruling the land, so his brother kicked him out. A ship full of men from Milan arrive at the island many years later, Prospero knows it is her brother and his men, so she creates a storm, wrecking their ship. Every man makes it to the island alive and Miranda even falls in love with a prince that was on board. They decide they are going to get married. Oh! I forgot to tell you that prospero has to slaves, Ariel the spirit, and Caliban the monster. When Shakespeare was writing the play, he imagined that those two characters were the two different sides of him. anyway, there is many more encounters with people from Milan and people from the island, and then they all meet in the end, and they all live happily ever after. If you want to watch a video of one rendition of the tempest, it’s a movie version instead of theatre:

Anyway, there are 5 acts in the play and we would watch each one, study it, and then make sure we knew it in an app called, shocker, “ The Tempest”. So here it is in a nutshell:

There isn’t much to get into about it so I will tell the rest when I explain our project.

COLONIZING IN A TEMPEST

 

now don’t come to our school on this date, it’s already passed and we have already done our performance, it’s just there to show you the poster that we did use. Now that you know a little bit about New France and a little bit about the play, “The Tempest”, you are probably wondering why to completely different things are in this blog post. Well, to be honest, I wondered that myself when my teacher told us we would be doing a project on them…. COMBINED.

Our challenge was to create a tableau (frozen scenes on a stage, kind of like a skit without movement or speech), in groups of four and each one got a part of New France and an act from the tempest. We got major players of New France and Act 3. In my group was Kyle, Luciano, and Caleb. Yes, I was the only girl in my group, yippee!! We had to mix them together to create an amazing, entertaining show that we would be presenting to our parents in no longer than… A WEEK. I’m really sorry for all of the suspense, I’ve done it a few times in this post.

The first thing we did was make a draft of what our tableaus would look like on stage:

As you can see, they are very rough and of course they didn’t actually look like that. We got a bit of critique and then we moved on. It was time to make our backgrounds that would be on the screen behind us as we did the tableaus, to make it more interesting. Here were the first ones we made.

 

Looking back, these were definitely not our best work, what were we thinking. Again, we got some critique and then fixed them until they were perfect, you will see them in th video below.

 

The final piece of the puzzle in creating our tableaus was to write the narration. I know I said before that in tableaus there is no speech, and there usually isn’t in a traditional one, but we realized that our performance would be very hard to follow without some explanation. You can check out our drafts below, they didn’t change much we just improved and made it so that we distributed the lines instead of Kyle being the only narrator.

 

We practiced and practiced as the night came closer, organized costumes, practiced lines etc. And then it came!!! We were super prepared and it went really well! I messed up on one of my lines and stood there for 10 seconds silently, but I mean, in the big picture, it’s not a big deal.

This was our last unit in Humanities!! And it was a good one. It may have been quick and speedy, only 2 weeks, but I learned as much as I could have in a normal unit. Ms. Willemse even said that New France was a boring topic to learn about, but when we mixed it with other things it was actually really fun. I think this project really describes PLP, we didn’t just sit there and read about Shakespeare and New France, we made a full on presentation as a class to show our learning! I think that is pretty amazing. Ok guys, that’s all for today, thank you for stopping at My Dog Ate My Blog, I hope you come back soon!

~Jordyn