What’s up world, I’m back with another awesome blog post!
Over the span of the last few months the PLP 8 class has traveled back in time. At first, we looked at the crusades and feudalism at its finest. We then moved on and studied the Renaissance. Finally, we got to where we are now: the age of exploration. Buckle your seatbelts as we get into another humanities blog post!
We started out by choosing an explorer to research. The explorer we picked would eventually play a huge part for us towards the end of this project. The explorer I picked was Joseph de la Roche Daillon.
To start off, we had to do some quick research and fill out a sheet about his achievements. Here’s what mine looked liked.
This actually helped me a lot because I previously had never heard of this dude before I looked him up. A couple things that suprised me was that he didn’t have a recorded date of birth and that there wasn’t a ton of info about him. That meant I had my work cut out for me later on in the project.
Let me add right here that about a third of the way through the project, Ms. Willemse disappeared to Cuba for two weeks. The sub that we had was good, but probably wouldn’t have explained it as well as Ms. Willemse. Anyways, back to the blog.
Before Ms. Willemse left, she explained the full project to us. We had to create a comic about our explorer and the trips he went on. We could take some liberties to make it interesting. We also had to create a character that accompanied the explorer on the voyage.
In the end, we would have to convince the queen (ms. Willemse) to fund us on another exploration.
Firstly, we had to get some background knowledge.
We then looked at something I thought was quite interesting. About 20,000 years ago, a land bridge formed between Alaska and Siberia. This land bridge was called “Beringia”. It served as a major route for cross-continental migrations. Basically, enough water from the oceans froze into ice sheets and the water level dropped, leading to this bridge. Animals traveled across it and the humans followed the food.
After that, we looked at what motivated explorations from Renaissance Europe. What I learned was that there were three main reasons: trade, gold and Christianity. Lots of people in Europe wanted valuables such as spices and silk and so explorers went to trade for them. Countries also wanted to expand on their gold supply. That was a big part of exploration. Another huge part of exploration was spreading religion. Countries wanted to spread Christianity because that’s what they believed God wanted them to do.
Shortly after, we looked at how some countries focused on expansionism. Countries would send explorers solely to take new land for their countries. They also went and tried to find new resources on different continents. In doing this, we looked at certain explorers such as Jacques Cartier. He explored North America and traveled to stradacona, where he saw the native Americans. We watched a video detailing this encounter.⬆️
Keep in mind during learning all this we were still working hard on our comics and our presentations.
When Ms. Willemse returned, we had to do our persuasive presentation in front of her. I was really nervous, but check out how I did down below
I think that I could have rehearsed a little bit more and talked slower and quieter.
Anyways, that pretty much wraps up my post.
thanks for reading!
