Bonjour,
This post is about our most recent humanities project about Canada’s participation WWII and why the Juno Beach Centre should be preserved. Although this project seemed to have gone by really fast, we actually covered a lot of information. We started this project by taking notes on all of the major events of WWII and everything Canada did to contribute to the cause and then moved on to designating, brainstorming, drafting, and then writing our essays.
The driving question for our project was; “Why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre?” and to answer that we did the following.
WWII Notes
Early in the project we jumped right into it and began covering everything we had to know about WWII. Our teacher, Ms. Madsen, created a series of slideshows which we then took notes from. We learned things like the early storages of war, the Holocaust, Canada’s involvement, and the end of the war and how it all happened and led up to D-Day.
I found this part of the project the most interesting because I’ve always been interested in WWII and had been awaiting the project where we learned about it. Personally, I would have enjoyed a different final product because although we’re learning about Canada’s involvement in the war, I believe that there’s a lot more that we could have learned/focused on.
Keystone 1 – Historical Significance
I enjoyed Keystone 1 the most of the 3 keystones we accomplished because we identified Canada’s most significant contributions and why. If you follow the link below, you’ll see that I wrote about The Battle of the Atlantic, The freeing of the Netherlands, and the production and training of fighter planes and pilots.
I thought that this was the most interesting keystone because it was a lightly personalized assignment. Of course there are a certain amount of events that actually correspond to this topic but I liked that there wasn’t something generic that everyone was working towards accomplishing. I believe that if more keystones were like this, students would be more involved in their work because it requires personal reasoning and opinion. Please see my assignment below 👇
Keystone 2 – Rhetorical Analysis
This keystone was all about learning what rhetorical writing is and how to use it ourselves. What we did to do this was read a short article and then pick out the key information and specify it into groups like Purpose, Perspective, Audience, Ethos, Pathos, logos, etc. We worked in groups to complete a Pages template our teacher presented us with that had several questions that correlated with the idea of Rhetoric.
I thought this assignment was hard to do in the beginning but I then began to get the hang of it after I went ahead and completed another article-based assignment where now there were no questions to answer and we had to pick out the information we thought was valid and fell into the means of rhetoric. To this day I’m still not sure if this assignment was part of the keystone or not.
Finally the 2nd part of this keystone, (I guess my third) was to make a plan of how I was going to use and implement rhetoric writing in my final essay.
Keystone 3 – Writing Process
Now that we had learned about WWII, the significance of the storming of Juno Beach, and how to use Rhetoric in our writing it was time to begin our drafts for our argumentative essays about why the Juno Beach Centre should be preserved (even though it has already been preserved by the Canadian government🤷♂️). We started by making a list of Ethos and Pathos aspects of Juno Beach and its museum which would help convey our message by creating an emotional connection between the text and the reader. This part was a but of a pain but I’m glad I did it because it helped me a lot when writing my essay drafts.
Once that was finished, we moved on to writing our essay drafts. The procedure was to write your first draft, hand it in, and then get critique from a classmate, then you would fix your essay and do it all again with a new classmate. All that was needed was 2 rounds of meaningful revisions before it was ready to be looked at and move on to your final draft.
I managed to get solid feedback from my friend Max and my dad because I was only a little behind at the time. Although it seems like I rushed everything, by the end of the day I had a strongly structured and well-written argument on why the Juno Beach Centre should be preserved from French condo developments. Below are my 3 drafts 👇.
Composition – Final Draft 🏁
Finally, after all my drafts were completed, I moved on to my final draft. To be completely honest, there was barely anything that had to be changed other than a few grammar mistakes and sentence structuring so this last bit of our project was smooth sailing. I truly believe I wrote a strong argument using the rhetoric writing we learned earlier in this project and I’m glad you took the time to read all about it.
Please take the time to read my final essay below 👇. Thanks!