Guess what!?
Its another blog post! I have finished up yet another project and its time to reflect.
This time I have finished a Humanities project called, This Changes Everything- Middle Ages. In this project we were learning about how the Middle Ages compares to today. We were looking into continuity and change. Our focus was, What was Life Like in The Middle Ages? How Does it Compare to Today? We were creating a slideshow with a partner for the final part.
To start the project and learn about the Middle Ages we read a book called The Book of The Lion. It was set in the Middle Ages and was all about the crusades. It was the journey of one squire and his friends. Before we started the book we had to write a book plan, saying when we would read what’s skills we would use to remember each chapter. We would write if we were going to highlight important stuff, or write a short note at the end of each chapter. During the reading I tried both of these techniques, each a different week. I think highlighting important parts worked better for me because a lot of the time I would forget to make a note and have to go back and try to remember. With the highlighting I would just highlight it right when I was reading it, so I was almost rereading an important sentence. I would also highlight in different colours based on weather it was about a character or scene description.
Each week we had a certain amount of chapters to read, to then complete a task about. We would get into book groups and share what we had done for the week. The first week I was an artist, I had to creat an art piece on something that had happened in the chapters I had just finished reading. This is what I drew,
Other weeks I had to write a short summary or connect things from the book to my life and the world now. Doing the connection was the hardest for me because didn’t want to do something supper simple like, “ I have also seen a horse before”. So I really had to try and think of a couple connections to write down and present to my group.
We were also learning about the feudal system and how that has changed and how some of it has still stayed the same, compared to now. As an activity we each drew a roll from a bin, there were surfs, knights, priests, monks and of course the king. I drew the roll of a Middle Ages Priest, a pretty high up roll compared to others. We sat in groups according to our roll, so I was sitting with two monks. With these rolls we were to research what their everyday life would look like, and then write a letter to someone in our characters life explaining what’s going on. I wrote about where I lived, the people I talked to, my family members and what I did in my everyday life. I really liked writing this because it was cool to look at it from a different perspective, it made me think about it more. I got to be creative while also using facts on my characters life.
Once we were finished the book we were put into partners to complete the project. My partner was Jakub, and we were working together to put together a presentation on the Middle Ages. In our slideshow we were to pick two topics, one as an example of continuity and the other as an example of change.
Before we created a whole presentation we had to do our research. We researched five topics that we were interested in, we looked at borders, road transportation, human rights, technology, and taxes. We created a pages document and wrote a little bit about each of them. Afterward we chose two to make our slideshow on, for continuity we did road transportation and for change we did borders.
In our slideshow we were supposed to use lots of animations and engaging photos, with no more than three words per slide. Since we were doing road travel, we had cars and horses moving across a road. We were also using the presenter notes to write our facts in, so that when we went to present we were ready to use just one device. We only had a day or two to put together our slideshow before we had to do a practice presentation in front of our teacher. We got some small feedback to change titles and fonts, and to keep eyes up while presenting. We were both relying on our notes to much and needed to remember what to say for each slide without constantly looking down. That night I went home and tried to remember it more but of course with nerves I was looking down a bit during the presentation. Here you can go through my presentation,
I think that I did pretty well with my presentation, I don’t think it is my best presentation but it was definitely better than others. This project was really fun, I liked creating the slideshow, and I personally like presenting sometimes. Its nice to and show other people your work!
“The succession of your presentation will be judged not by the knowledge you send but by what type listener receives”
– Lily Walters