To finish off our last socials unit for the year, we’ve been assigned one last thing to do before the end of school. What is that one last thing to do? Well we’ve been learning about the history of Canada and how it came to be. We learned about the Metis, HBC, confederation, etc. After spending a few weeks learning about the greatest moments in history (just the Canadian parts,) we were told to think of what we consider to be the greatest moment in Canada. To go along with the greatest moment in Canada (according to our opinions,) we also had to create some kind of creative element to the moment. It could be anything from a poster to a video.

We were given the benefit to work with a partner if we wanted to, so Robbie and I teamed up to make a sock puppet interpretation of what we consider to be the greatest moment in Canadian history, the Cariboo Gold Rush.

So why was the Cariboo Gold Rush one of the greatest moments in Canadian history? Well, this gold rush in particular brought a whole lot of people to British Columbia. It made the colony very wealthy at the time and was opening many jobs and business opportunities. BC was rapidly becoming more successful and was spending large sums of money to keep the people coming to BC. Eventually though, the gold rush ended, and that’s where things got interesting. The economy of BC had collapsed and many, many problems arose from the gold rush ending. People were flooding out of BC after they were done with finding gold which meant that all the companies which were relying on frequent customers failed. BC had also spent a lot of money on trails and different things for the people coming to Canada. A debt of over one million dollars had been racked up by BC, and they were struggling.
Because of this struggle, BC was a lot more inclined to actually join Canada in confederation or even the States in annexation. Without that need to get help from a bigger government, the history of Canada might be a lot more different without the addition of BC.
This is why Robbie and I believe that the Cariboo Gold Rush is the greatest moment in Canadian history as if it didn’t happen, this story about BC could’ve ended up as one of America’s great moments.

The creation process of this video was actually very, very similar to the creation process of the Frankenstuffy video as I used the same “McGyver” green screen set up I came up with in this Greatest Moments video and the Frankenstuffy video.

We were looking for more of a cartoonish/ironic approach for our video compared to other videos both of us have done in the past. It was meant to be nothing serious and we took inspiration from many educational kids shows such as The Magic School Bus and cartoons like Spongebob. The video itself turned out ok. I wouldn’t call it my best work but it’s not half bad.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with having finished one more assignment before the end of the school year. It was quick and relatively easy, so it felt like a nice way to end the school year with.
For now though, I finally get to kick my feet up and relax. Finally…