In these last few months, our humanities class has been focused on the topic of the First World War. Our driving question was “How did WW1 impact Canada’s identity?”. The first assignment of our WW1 unit was to read one of three books that were assigned to us over spring break. The three books consisted or War Horse, Private Peaceful, and Generals Die In Bed. Out of all three of these books, the one that seemed the most interesting to me was Generals Die In Bed. This book was about a soldier named Charles and his experiences in the first world war and all the challenges he faced. Reading this book was our first introduction to the First World War, before we did this, we had to learn the reason the war started in the first place. It all started with the assassination of someone called Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie who was. He was the Archduke of Austria and he was shot by a Serbian member of a terrorist group called the black hand. Although there were many other reasons for the war break out, this tragic event triggered the beginning of the First World War.

We learned about many events and battles that occurred in World War One on our trip to Ottawa, which I also wrote a post about earlier. Click here to check it out! This trip war run by Encounters With Canada, and was a way to not only teach us about The First World War, but to give us a chance to meet friends from all over our beautiful country of Canada. It was a unique experience that I will never forget, and gave me a chance to learn in depth about one of my favourite battles of WW1, the Battle of Vimy Ridge. This was the battle where we as Canadians got a name for ourself, and it brought Canada closer together as a country as well.

There were many topics to do with WW1 that we learned about, and the next task we had was to pick one and make a four page comic on it. The topic that I chose was a woman’s changing role in the First World War, but I narrowed it down to A Mother’s Changing Role In WW1. After extensive research on my topic, I put all my ideas into a simpler form to fit it into the comic. Inserting my information wasn’t the hard part, the most difficulty I had was making sure that the comic itself had good formatting and was aesthetically pleasing. My comic had gotten critiqued not only by myself, but also by my peers. Some of the feedback that I got was about little things like font and the alignment of text boxes, but other than that, my comic was looking pretty good. After editing it several times, it was finally ready to present to an audience. We took a trip to one of our local elementary schools and showed our comics to a class of sixth and seventh graders. These kids weren’t quite familiar with the topic of WW1, so it was fun to be able to answer their questions about it and share with them some information about the various events of the war.

After our visit to Cove Cliff Elementary, we took a look at a site called shattered ground. On this site, we walked through the story of a kid who was looking through pictures and diary entries from his great grandfather who fought in the war. We were taken through the many memories of his great grandfather’s experiences in the war and saw the things that he went through. We had to take notes and answer questions about each chapter.

This whole unit has taught me things that I will always remember. Weather it be the significance of each battle, Canada’s role in the war, or how the war started in the first place, the amount of learning that took place during this unit was incredibly large. I not only learned about the war and everything that happened during it, but I also obtained some new formatting skills of comic life, learned how to keep seventh graders entertained for an hour, and most importantly, I learned that Canada as a country was uniquely impacted by the war. Canada came out of the war more united then when it went in, and as for our identity, we no longer specifically identity only with our individual province, but rather one country that encompasses all Canadian provinces alike.