Stuffies n’ Revolutions p.1

Hello and welcome to the halfway point of this project. You might be asking, “what is the project?” Well, let me tell you it’s the weirdest most interesting project I’ve ever done.

On the first day, we started by destroying stuffies, trading their parts and creating “frankenstuffies”. This was one of the most fun project launches I’ve ever done. Even though cutting and sewing stuffies didn’t teach me much I will never forget about it. I made a kangaroo-bunny-owl named Murfy. So if you are interested in what the day was like here are some photos and videos of how we did it!

Now let me tell you about the not-so-entertaining part of this project, my learning.

This project has required A LOT of learning because I knew absolutely nothing about the Industrial Revolution. This means that everything we learnt about the Revolution was completely new to me. Some things that really stuck to me and changed the way I looked at history are these things:

1.  The way the traditional society worked BEFORE the Industrial Revolution. I knew absolutely nothing about working strips. I knew that people in the lower classes had to work all the time, I guess I never really knew what kind of work they had to do. So I learned a lot about how the strip system worked.
2. How harsh living in the lower class was before the Revolution. I didn’t realize how awful it was. I guess from movies I had romanticized it, I was imagining fields and cute cottages. the thing that stuck out to me was the fact that 50% of children died before they turned 5.
3. The timeline of the Industrial Revolution. For some reason, I thought that factories weren’t a common thing until the 1900s. It was very interesting to learn that people who worked in factories had to live in slums.

For our first milestone, we wrote a short story about our stuffie and the Industrial Revolution. we wrote a short story last year in our New France project however, this did not mean I knew anything about writing. So we got. A crash course on how to write well. I’m not sure I can emphasize how helpful this was. I don’t think of myself as a writer, I thought it would be easy, I’ve read so many books that I thought I was going to be a pro. This was not the case, I have lots of good ideas but struggle to bet them on the page in a good, understandable way. I learned a lot about how to organize a story, even though we’ve been taught this a lot something clicked better this time. The thing that really helped me complete my story was reading the other short stories. We read 5 short stories that were pretty dark(my favourite kind of story), reading these helped me figure out what made them good. All the stories we read had some kind of interpretation that was needed which made them much more interesting. When I wrote my story I tried to add some mystery and room for interpretation for the reader. If I were to write my story again I would’ve tried to add more dialogue but I think for this story it worked for it to have less dialogue. My story is not exactly award material but it’s a big improvement from my last story.

Moving on in this project I hope to further improve my video skills. We started learning about how we can use all the different apps we have o our iPads. This was helpful because I would like to start making my videos more creative. I’ve come so far already with my video skills but since we’re going to be focusing a lot on them this year I’m going to need more practice. So far the most powerful tool I’ve learnt how to use this year is green screening. It’s so cool and you can place anything you want anywhere you want. I even used it to mak the cover photo for this blog!
See you at the end of this project…. and have a Merry-almost-Christmas!