Hello and welcome back to the one and only blog you will ever need top read in your entire life. Recently we finished our very first Humanities project of Grade 10 and all I have to say is that it was interesting. This project was taught by one of our brand new teachers, Ms. Madsen, who taught us what we needed to know about gold in BC as a whole before we researched our own related categories.
As usual, our class had a driving question to guide us through our learning. Honestly a pretty generic question (like the rest of them) in my opinion but it serves its purpose:
How did the discovery of gold shape our province and its people?
Even though some people could answer with their own very true statements, we were tasked to find a specific group of people who came to BC in search of partaking in the gold rushes, and end up helping shape the economy and population of BC. I was assigned to research Chinese-Canadian gold miners, which was great for me because there is lots of information on this particular group unlike others. (Cough, cough, Chileans, cough, cough)
Although all the research we did prior to our individual research was beneficial, it doesn’t rank as high as the rest of the work I will discuss with you so were gonna go right ahead and skip that not so interesting bit.
Keystone 1
The very first KEYSTONE we were assigned (no clue why they’re not called Milestones anymore 🤷♂️) was called a “Web of Causes and Consequences”. Basically I wrote down the underlying events that led to the creation of the BC gold rush and the influx of people, and then the aftermath of it. I actually found this keystone rather easy because it all made sense to me. Maybe I’m cluelessly bragging or maybe it was just much easier than milestones we’ve had in the past . I strongly understood which events led to the rise of BC that related to the gold rush, and ho to properly split them up into esperaste events.
Keystone 2
Our second Keystone was when I began researching the Chinese history in the BC gold rushes and their influence on the economy. This keystone was about making a character card (⬇️Below⬇️) about who our character was, their job, a summarized bit of their life in their original country, why they moved to canada, how they ended up contributing to the BC economy, and 2 important artifacts that our miner used in their daily life in BC. This was the mor e interesting part of the project because I got to design and make my own BC miner. I decided to name him Jack Wang because years ago in Grade 6 my friend Jack Wang suddenly disappeared and supposedly moved to China. Anyways not important. I found it a bit challenging to make his story because I didn’t really know what life in Hong Kong in the mid 1800s looked like. After some quick research I managed to piece together Jack Wang and his life story.
Keystone 3
Finally our third keystone was our final planning document. What we did here was to build the Story Spine of the story we were working up towards. Most people’s Story Spines were somewhat brief and showed what their story was in short form. However, mine was completely different than the rest because it was pretty much my entire story broken up into separate chunks. This keystone was somewhat easy for me to finish because since the beginning of the project I already had an idea of what my story would consist of.
🏁Final Story🏁
As you probably noticed I haven’t added my story to this post. However there is this specific QR code that will take you to a Craft webpage where you will see my Story. This QR code thing is new to PLP because our teachers are encouraging and involving the app Craft to help us organize and produce quality work.
I called my story “Coming to Canada” because it’s about a young Chinese man fulfilling his dreams of starting a new life in British Columbia.
At the beginning of the project I thought that working towards writing a story. I thought it didn’t really live up PLP’s standards but I found that the things we learned throughout the project were really important. I learned lots about some of BC’s dark history which has been kept quiet for a long time. I found that learning about all aspects of BC’s past is important so that our generation can continue to fix the mistakes past leaders made.
Adios.