Save Juno Beach

Hello and Welcome to another post! In this post I am going to be talking about the last humanities project we completed called “Save Juno Beach”. Throughout this project we learned about World War II to contribute to the final product about why we need to preserve the Juno Beach Centre. In this project I was able to reflect lots on my learning to create the final product which answers the driving question.

We started off as project by taking reminding ourselves on what happened in world war, one, and following along different presentations to continue our learning, moving onto World War II. Throughout this time I had a document that I was taking notes on which I would later use to create a few summaries. In these presentations we learned about multiple different battles including the next investigation which was a formula we used many times throughout this project. This formula is called the P.E.E formula which stands for Point, Evidence, and Explanation. This first task was a good opportunity to learn how to write what you think and follow it up with why you think that and why that’s important to the question being asked. 

This brings me to Keystone 1, the Historical Significance of WWII. For this keystone we identifies the three most important reasons why WWII was significant. This was basically three PEE Formulas. The three reasons I talked about was the Canadian Military and how their reputation played an important role in WWII, the Economic Development, and lastly the Social Changes that made Canada a more inclusive and diverse country. I think this keystone really helped remind me of whats considered historically significant and bring all that information together to successfully accomplish this keystone.

Using the information we learned and determining what makes something historically significant we then moved onto Keystone 2. This keystone consisted of two different parts, 1: A rhetorical analysis of a text, and 2: An analysis of our own rhetorical situation for this project. For the first part of this keystone we read a piece of text called “Thanks for not killing my son”. When completing this, I took notes on the PDF to help me later on create a rhetorical analysis on the text. I then create a Craft document and wrote a multi paragraph response using the targeted goal “I can competently use elements of rhetoric to analyze the effectiveness of a text”. I feel I struggled a bit on this Keystone as I was away when we were learning about rhetorical analysis, so I completed multiple revisions. However I do feel using this text as a way to understand rhetorical analysis helped for part two. Then we completed part two which was a chart with information like who is your audience, whats the purpose of your writing, whats you topic, etc. When I was filling this out I used what I learned from part one to build an understanding on what specifically I would talk about in my composition.

Lastly we completed keystone two and the composition. Keystone three was made up of five steps all in the “writing process”. The first step was created a thesis for your writing. I ended up writing a few different drafts for this step but my final thesis was “D-Day was important to shape Canada into the country it is today and we need to educate people on the importance of saving Juno Beach. We need to do this because it led to many positive impacts for Canada that we continue to benefit from today. If I were to revise this one last time I think I would be a little more specific on what the impacts it made that we benefit from today. The reason I did not do this before was because I was trying to keep it concise. Next we completed a brainstorming chart using the sections Logos and pathos. Under the logos column I wrote about the factual information I would use to support my thesis. Under pathos I wrote how I would make my writing appeal to my readers emotions. I think this brainstorming helped me get all the key points down of what I was going to write about to make it easier for the next steps. 

This brings me to the many drafts I completed. To ensure I brought the most out of my writing I got four people to give me feedback so that I was able to complete three drafts. The third draft ended up being my final one/composition. When I was revising I was able to get lots of specific feedback on things like grammar, being more specific and going into detail on some parts, and adding and removing a few sentences. As I was receiving feedback I was also giving others feedback on their writing. 

Overall I think I could have worked a little bit more on the keystones leading up to the final product as I feel this would have helped extend my learning even further. If you have not read my final draft “Sand and Sacrifice” and are interested in learning why we should preserve the Juno Beach Centre then it’s up above. Thanks for reading another post and I will be back with more shortly.