Category Archives: Humanities

Hello. This is my last grade 9 humanities post. And it’s about WW1. Let’s get it.

For the past month and a bit we’ve been studying WW1.

Learning about WW1:

Like a lot of people know, the event that really started the war was when a Serbian Extremist killed the Archduke of the Austri0-Hungarian Empire, Franz Fernidand. Many other things led up to the war but when the Archduke got killed, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia came to Serbia’s aid, Germany was allied to Austria-Hungary and so it became a tangled and complicated war that would spread out across the world.

For a better explanation check out the video below.

https://youtu.be/U7EFh0Jl1Gg

A few of the boys and I made a short video about what happened in WW1 if it were a bar fight. It isn’t super clear but it helped us understand the conflict a bit better.

We’ve also watched plenty of videos from the YouTube channel “The Great War”. My teacher really seems to like the guy in it Indie Nidel.

The project:

We each had to create a video about a certain aspect of the war through a Canadian Perspective.

Other people who chose to do a stop motion were Kyle, Taylor, and Sam.

My video:

https://youtu.be/SkTIuk_aoEg

I decided to make a stopmotion, partly because I’d never done one and it looks cool and also I thought it would be the best way to show the information and story I was trying to bring to light.

Screenplay:

My screenplay was essentially my script. And it was almost the first screenplay I’ve written by myself for this year.

It served mostly as my script because I only had voiceovers in my video.

Cove Cliff visit:

As part of the end of the project we went to Cove Cliff to show our videos to the Grade 6 and 7s. My little brother is that age so I was expecting them to Behave similarly to him. Since the start of the project we had to focus on making our videos for a younger age. I presented to three groups. The first group was 2 boys who were really engaged but I could tell they were losing interest when I gave them questions to answer. I then went to a group of 8 girls. Honestly I felt very intimated in front of them. And my last group was a group of boys who were really interested in all the videos in they watched. However I could tell they were starting to lose interest. So talking to them about what they like to do outside of school worked a lot better.

Reflection:

I really enjoyed learning how to make the stop motion, it was a lot easier than I thought. I’d been told it was very time-consuming but it wasn’t so bad. I’d say I already knew a fair bit about the war but this unit made us think about it differently and in more depth.

Well that about wraps it up for this year.

See ya.

Back at it again. This time it’s Humanities. I was a Voyageur (which if you don’t know what that is, I can explain later).

My group members were Emerson, Taylor and Kiera. We were assigned the Fur Trade as a topic. But that’s very broad so we narrowed it down to the Voyageurs.

We researched what they did, what they wore, and how they traveled. The Voyageurs were mostly French Canadians who worked as contractors for the Fur companies. They rode canoes up and down rivers across Canada to deliver goods, and receive furs. They tended to be short to have the most space on the canoes. To keep morale up while on their canoes, they sang.

Our initial filming was pretty rushed and way ahead of everybody’s because Kiera was leaving and all of us had busy schedules. However we got the most important footage down. We later had to refilm the talking seems because the French wasn’t good, we had a little profanity, and some of the shots we just thought about better angles.

Here’s our video.

https://youtu.be/xuPCvpELGAc

I mostly realized from this project that it is not easy to try and film something and make it look like it’s form another time, partly because you can’t find props from the era. If I were to change something with the video is more preparation for certain shots because we already knew we didn’t have too much time to film.

We finished off by sending the videos from our class to Historica Canada, the company who makes the actual heritage minutes.

We emailed Historical Canada to get some feed back from them. We got responses from Ryan Barnett and Joanne Archibald. Joanne is the Heritage Minutes coordinator.

Well that’s it. See you soon.

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Hello again. Today you’re here reading about my latest Humanities unit. The Power and how it affects us as humans. But actually though, the driving question was “How does power alter relationships between individuals and societies?”. Let’s get on with it.

Power

Book:

There was one person we most studied during the unit. This person was very controversial in Canadian history, Louis Riel. We read a comic book (displayed below) about his life. We read for four weeks and every week we would have to write a quick summary of what happened in each part and discuss it with our group. Between the discussions we did smaller activities about other people or things from that stage  in Canadian history. Near the end we did a debate ,with a very questionable winner, about Louis Riel being evil or good. I was on the side where we were making points about why he was an evil man. Personally I don’t really think he was a bad man. However we lost the debate because my good friend Emerson from the other side said what he had just said didn’t make any sense and sat down.

However we now know that Louis Riel is the man responsible for Manitoba Boeing a province. And his moustache is one of the greatest things your eyes will ever see.

The comic book we read throughout the project.

Animation:

Louis Joseph Papineau
My Power Person

Our main project for the unit, was making an animation. But about what? Everybody in the class chose a person important in Canadian history and we had to show how they had used the power they had and if they had empowered some people or disempowered them. To actually animate something yourself, you need to draw a lot. I wasn’t ready to make like 1500 frames for an animation so I used my lazy brain to come up with a solution. I asked my teacher if I could use PuppetPals2 where all the characters are already there and you can move them around. And she said yes. That was some good news. Any ways I picked Louis-Joseph Papineau, a French Canadian lawyer and politician. However his era was before Canada became it’s own country. He did live enough to see it though. The story of power I told about him in my animation however was the Lower Canada Rebellion. Being a French Canadian politician in a British colony, he wanted reform. May I add that this colony was Lower Canada where the vast majority of people living there were French Canadian. Louis Joseph Papineau was a great public speaker which took him far. The French Canadiens wanted more representation in the colony but Britain wouldn’t let them. Papineau kept pushing until eventually it sparked a rebellion.

https://youtu.be/IFqpcJBSgDc

If you watched the animation, I hope you enjoyed it and learned something.

Quick reflection on the unit:

I came in a bit late to the unit missing a few things about power but I was just in time for the project. It was actually pretty fun to make my animation, however I wish I put a bit more time into it. I was happy with my final result but it could have easily been better. I learned a few things on PuppetPals and that it’s a lot more useful than I thought it was. I didn’t use FlipaClip because I’m not a very good drawer and when I had kind of tried it, it didn’t work out to well. I like group projects better, because everybody can have their own specialty meanwhile in individual projects you have to do everything. I came out of the project knowing a little more about early Canada, and some key people for the formation of the country we live in today.

Congratulations you have reached the end of my post.

Good Night Ladies and Gentlemen.

Hello I’m back with another post. About the Winter Exhibition I wasn’t at. This year it was a group project and I’ll get into more detail below.

Exhibition:

So, this year the exhibition was with a group. My group was the largest because 2 of us left. Jordyn to Jamaica and I left to Colombia (more on that later on). Anyways in my group was Kyle, Jason, Gabby, Jordyn, Fraser, and of course, myself. Our task was to create a story and bring it to life in a room. So get and idea for this we read a few different stories to learn how to set a mood or make the room tell a story.

That’s why we also got to go on a field trip to an escape room which was pretty fun. However it also had to include a bit of science. In my recent post about chemistry, I talk about my animation with Fraser. Well this time we kind of had to combine 3 group’s animations in to our exhibition.

In my opinion, probably my major contribution for my group was designing, cutting out and assembling the cash for our project. Below are the samples.

I honestly think I could’ve stepped up and gotten more involved because ultimately our story kind of got voted out and cast away. I

Now for the probably more interesting and definitely more fun part of this post.

Colombia:

On January 19th, about 33 hours before the start of th exhibition I was at the airport headed for Colombia.

I had a 1 day stop at the beach in Cancún and then headed for Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. It has an elevation of 2600 meters above sea level, the third highest capital city in the world. The day I arrived, my uncle took me on a hike up to Montserrate, a hill in Bogotá that goes up to 3100 meters above sea level. Surprisingly I wasn’t too exhausted and it was a beautiful view.

Probably the biggest difference between Colombia and Canada was sheer population density. There are 5 million more people in Colombia than there are in Canada and it’s almost ten times smaller. Here, motorcycles are for recreation, in Colombia it’s very important form of transportation since they’re a lot more maneuverable than a car.

In the middle right of the picture, you can see a police motorcycle cutting between cars.

When I got back to Vancouver it sounded deserted after Bogotá, where cars are swerving and honking, motorcycles cut between cars and there are street vendors everywhere.

However one of th highlights of my trip were some beautiful waterfalls at the end of a hike over to mountains.

Well you reached the end of this post about the exhibition and why I skipped. Sorry about the lack of pictures a the top but I didn’t really take any.

Hello I’m back again and it looks like I’m going to be here a lot for the following weeks. My teacher just enrolled us in a blogging challenge🎉. But not really, it’s not my favourite thing to do. Although it doesn’t seem too bad. Anyhow, the main topic for this post is, wait for it, read the title. Transportation in steampunk vs reality.

Well the first of three main different types of transportation is air.

The most iconic steampunk air traveller would be an airship or a kind of zeppelin. We as humans used these for awhile but the problem was we used hydrogen which is flammable. Any tiny spark could blow the ship up. However we think that in a steampunk world it would be the best way.

A U.S. Navy airship likely afloat with hydrogen

In modern day however we use airplanes which can come in many different shapes and sizes. Airplanes use fuel based off petroleum most of the time to keep the jet engines going. An advantage of the airplane is that it can be a lot faster than an airship as it relies on the speed to stay aloft.

The second, is land

Cars are part of society nowadays. It’s a necessity for many people. They get better every year, technology and safetty wise. Cars can take us new places quicker than running.

Trains are different than cars though. They as the tankers (below in the water transportation) are made for heavy loads to cross continents.

Steampunk machines for land transport can be very unique. Some are a bit more similar and likely to have happened like the one below though. Gasoline however is more efficient currently than steam for cars otherwise we might have steam engines.

Possible car except with steam engine

Some funky looking land vehicles like the one below are very unrealistic. There’s nothing very similar to this that’s real that I know of.

Mechanical Spider-ish land vehicle]

The third and last main transportation method is water:

The thing is in many steampunk worlds you won’t hear much mention of water craft. Earth is mostly covered by water so it was kind of a surprise for me. However you will hear about submarines in some steampunk worlds. In a few of the books I’ve read that were kind of steampunk the submarines were mostly for research purposes. At this point all of them are manned pretty much contrary to modern research ones that can be unmanned and controlled with a computer.

Steampunk submarines, many times are for research.

Modern submarines are mostly used for military purposes

Water vessels in reality though, are very important. There’s many things humans have created but are impossible to carry through the air and you can’t travel by land if there is no land. The ships like the one right below are used for heavy transport that can carry huge amounts. Lots of people are very against these enormous ships but they carry many things we use in our daily lives.

Tanker ships carry huge containers in big masses, carry oil and gas, and many other things.

Another main use for boats today is the fishing industries. Although many fish supplies are becoming scarcer, fishing is still a big industry in many places, like the Pacific North West or the East Coast of Canada.

A commercial fishing boat

Well, that’s it for this post, see you soon.

Picture Sources:

Airplane

Airship

Second airship

Modern-day car

Steam locomotive

Steampunk coach

Tanker ship

Fishing boat

Modern submarine

Steampunk submarine

Hello.

For this unit’s main project, we were tasked with making a video about the land impacts our identities and explain this with examples from places on our trip.

We were supposed to have another draft but I didn’t get that done so Ms. Maxwelljust gave me a few tips to make the video.

Here’s my final draft of my video.

https://youtu.be/k38_9mXWsyA

See you soon,

Luciano