How can exploring stories and text help us understand the impact of Canada’s identity?
This is the question me and my class have recently been trying to answer.
Hi there and welcome back to another one of my blog posts, todays blog post is about our most recent humanities project on WW1 or the Great War. Our final product for this project was for us to research a Canadian soldier and a topic about the Great War, once we created 4-5 pages of research we were to send them to our teacher for her to create a PLP 9 WW1 book with everyone’s soldier and topic research.
Our first milestone for this project was ‘the domino effect’,
our task for this milestone was to create a piece of media (video, sketch, comic, explain everything, stop motion, puppet show, political cartoon, mindmap, book creator, podcast) to explain what this visual represents of the domino effect of how WW1 begun. I decided to do a sketch to represent that this war begun due to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand of Austria. I also added aa bit of writing to represent my thoughts behind it. ‘The black hand from Russia assassinated Duke Ferdinand of Austria, Austria is allied with Hungary and Germany, Russia is allied with France, the UK and Canada, therefore Austria, Hungary and Germany are at war with Canada, UK, France and Russia’.
Milestone 2 was the starting of our soldier research, for this milestone we put or research in a different format than the the one for the book. The soldier I chose is Roy Phillip Hutchison (my great great grandfather) the outline for what we needed to include int his page was:
• Name of Soldier
• Life Span (in years)
• Role in the War
• Potential IMAGE – (really try to find one with any image or newspaper clipping)
• Where is your soldier from?
• Why did they go to war?
• How old were they when they went?
• Did they survive? If not – how did they die in War?
• Any battles that he was present at?
• Family relations and ties? Wife, brothers, sisters?
• ANY interesting facts or stories you can find about your soldier.
Our third milestone was to start out research for our topic pages. The topics we could choose from were:
The Assassination of ArchDuke
Canada Enters the War
The Triple Entente
The Triple Alliance
The War at Sea
The War in the Air
Technology of Artillery
Tools used in the Trenches
Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF)
Role of Animals in the war
WWI Tanks
The 2nd Battle of Ypres
Flanders Fields
Vimy Ridge
Battle of the Somme
Eastern Front and Russian Revolution
Conscription
Propaganda in WWI
Film Industry and the War
The Schlieffen Plan
Passchendaele
The Halifax Disaster
Minorities in the War
Shell Shock
Life on the Homefront
Chemical Warfare
Changing Role of Women
Nurses in the War
Canada’s Hundred Days
Discontent in Germany
Changing Borders of Europe WWI
Treaty of Versailles
The Unknown Soldiers
I decided that I wanted to choose the role of animals in the war, the reason as to why this was my first choice is because I love animals and was curious if there were less obvious animals with roles in WW1. I found many roles for animals on many website and narrowed my focus on two animals that aren’t as obvious of a choice, the animals I chose were dogs and birds. Dogs would used to carry first aid packs and find wounded soldier so that the soldier could help themselves, dog would also find dying soldiers and stay with them till they pass so they aren’t alone. Birds on the other hand would send messages, they would put the bird’s nest where they wanted to send and receive the messages because birds always fly home.
The next milestone we were assigned to read 1 of 3 books, the options we were given were War Horse, Private Peaceful, Generals Die In Bed. We were to say our top three or surprise me, our teacher than assigned us each a book and a book group. I decided to say surprise me and was given War horse, I was quite happy since my topic was the role of animals in WW1. The other people in my class who got assigned this book were Anders, Julia, Jude, Alex, Matthew, Emily and Liam. For 4 Thursdays we zoomed and discussed the chapters we read for that week and shared a certain form of media we completed for that week.
For our second last milestone we had to create our final drafts of our topic and soldier pages and hand them so our teacher could put them all together and create our class book. We had to send in an ePub and a PDF so if she needed to give feedback she could do it on the PDF, if we got feedback we would have to make those changes then send in in as an ePub for our final pages.
Our last milestone is what your are reading now, usually our final milestone are to create a blog post about our projects.
Our competencies for this project were
Comprehend: What literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding?
Take Historical Perspective: How can we overcome our current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand those of people in the past?
The milestones that I think best represented the Comprehend competency were probably 1and 4, for these milestone I used my knowledge of media and stories to comprehend and understand the meaning behind not just my media and stories but other’s media and stories.
For the take historical perspective competency the milestones I think best represent this competency are 2,3, 4 and 5. These milestones helped me understand the stories of other people and animals and how WW1 effected them.
This was a great project and I have always wanted to learn more about WW1.