If I asked you what confederation was you would probably have some vague idea about Canada becoming a country but not really have a full answer. Well, that’s what we have been learning about in class since winter break. Canadian confederation and the history and events leading up to it. It’s a pretty big deal if you think about it too, this is how Canada, the place we live in became a country. We have been doing tons of fun activities, lessons and projects to learn about this and, in this post hopefully you can learn some things too.
To get started let’s go all the way back to the beginning of January. This is when we really started learning about Canadian history. At first we learned about all of the first colonizers and colonies. About First Nations trading and intercolonial relationships. I really liked this part of the unit because all of the things we were learning about at this point were really the basics and foundations of what Canada was built on. One of my favourite activities we did in class for this part of Canadian heritage was called the rebellion investigation. In this class we went on this super interactive game/investigation that was a fun way of getting an in depth knowledge and understanding of what we were looking at.
After a week or two of getting to know our topic we were introduced to the main project of this unit. Our heritage minute. If you don’t know what a heritage minutes is it’s pretty self explanatory. It is a one minute video about a topic that relates to Canada’s heritage, wether that means it’s about the creation of basketball or about an important city. Anyways, our task was to create a heritage minute and share it with the world.
We were all grouped up into several different groups with broad topics and from those we could choose an exact topic. Our group (which consisted of Me, Keifer, Alivia, and Daniel) was on battles a rebellions. After lots of research and thoughts we narrowed our selection down to a few and we eventually picked The Battle of St. Eustache. We thought this would be a good topic because it was one of the battles of a rebellion so it involved both topics.
The video creation process was a lot like Frankenstuffies which was a previous project in the preparation phase. we had to create a storyboard and a script, only this time it was in groups so we had more brains on the same job. Looking back I think that it is always important to have a strong script and storyboard because the less post production work you have to do the easier it is to create, the less refilming and often the better the final product looks. After our scripts and storyboards we moved on to filming. The filming of our video was one of the more challenging aspects of our project. Because our story is set in the 1800’s finding an appropriate set was quite a challenge. Also one of the sides of the fight was all French so speaking complicated French was also a bit of a struggle, all considered though the filming went fairly smoothly after we worked out all the problems.
After we fully shot and edited our first draft we came to class to present it. We got lots of helpful feed back on what to improved and what to change. The first draft was only being shown to PLP but the the second draft was being shown to the whole of grade 9. Our second draft was a lot better than the first but we still got some peer review feedback from the other grade 9’s in our school. Some of the reviews were very helpful but some weren’t. One just said “make better” as an example of a not so helpful one. The next step was actually sending our videos to Historica Canada, the company that actually makes the real heritage minutes. Previously we had talked to a woman from historical Canada and she gave us lots of helpful advice. Here is our finished video
In reflection, I would say this is one of the projects that I learned the most from overall, it wasn’t my very favourite project (although I did like it) but it was definitely a good one. If I could do one thing differently I think I would go back and really make sure I knew every possible about my topic before I even started the most basic script out line. That way I can be really sure that this is the most interesting and most logical project. One thing I think I did really well is being a good group member. Sometimes in group projects I either get too involved or not involved enough and in this project I really think that I found a good balance of the two. This was definitely a project that represents PLP to its fullest.