Hello again readers and welcome back to another amazing, insightful, wonderful, awesome blog post!!
We recently finished a quick unit in humanities and, not gonna lie, it was actually pretty fun! Here’s what happened:
This unit was a two part unit where we learned about two very different things and then had to put them together. We started out learning about someone you may have heard of. His name was William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote lots of plays, but we studied one in particular. It’s one of his more successful plays, The Tempest. To study this, we downloaded an app with the screenplay for the play on it. We learned that there were 5 acts to this play. Each act had a few scenes to it.
To fully grasp an understanding of the play, Ms.Willemse had us watch an actual reproduction of The Tempest. We watched the actors on stage and followed along the script as they said it word for word. Along with this, we also watched a movie of The Tempest. It didn’t follow the script exactly, but it was more entertaining. In the movie, they were also able to use some special effects such as CGI which made it more clear in the point they were trying to make than the play. I thought it was a interesting contrast between the movie version and the play version. For example, one of the characters named Prospero changed genders between plays.
We then drastically changed subjects.
Even if it was somewhat confusing to our class, we started to look at colonization in New France.
At first, we learned about settlement and trade in New France and in the New world. Different countries traded various resources that were native to their homeland.
We also talked about settlement in New France. Samuel de Champlain and the Europeans were looking for the Far East and its many riches when they accidentally discovered North and South America. They took advantage of this discovery and set up trading posts. They also moved in on the First Nations land.
After that, we looked at the governal system of New France. It went somewhat like this:
Shortly then after, we learned about the battle of the fur trading companies. At first, there was only one main company. This company was called the Hudson’s Bay company. You may have heard of it before. They had no one to rival them, but a bunch of small independent fur traders came together to oppose the Hudson’s bay company. Their company was called the Northwest company. They mostly focused on trading inland where the Hudson’s bay company trading on, you guessed it, Hudson Bay. The Hudson Bay company was able to get their goods easier because they sailed in straight from Europe with resources to trade with the First Nations whereas the northwest company had to transport their goods by canoes. This led to the northwest company shutting down and joining the Hudson’s bay company with what we know today.
Lastly, we talked about the fall of New France. Britain and France fought over North America for a long time. They had three wars which accomplished nothing, but in the end there was a 7 year war where the British overcame the French using multiple strategies.
We then learned the difficult part about the unit- we had to take Shakespeare’s play and use the knowledge we learned about New France to make a representative tableau. A tableau is a still image which uses costumes and background pictures to make a point. So basically, we had to colonize in a Tempest!
My group, which consisted of Lucy, Fraser and Taylor, had to take act 2 of the Tempest and summarize it into two main points. We also had to take settlement and trade in New France and somehow incorporate that into the tableau. We then had to perform it on stage.
There were many rehearsals for this and it was pretty stressful for me because I missed 3 days of class golfing at the high school provincials. Luckily, I had an awesome group which kept me up to date with what we were doing.
We had to perform in the theatre and so all the presenters had to hide in the wings. In the end, this was a good thing because all of my friends were ready with my costumes when I came off to prepare for the next scene and I was ready for them as well.
Here’s the video of how it turned out!
In the end, I was really happy with how it turned out and how well my group worked together.
That’s going to wrap up this blog post!
Yours truly,
Nik
