Tag: world war

Commemorating Canada

Hello all and welcome back. This post will be regarding my most recent humanities project, Save Juno beach! In this project we got to learn about World War II and Canada’s involvement and significance in said war. I have been fascinated by WWII for many years now so I was super excited to do a WWII project! So without further ado, lets hop into the project.

Driving Question

Why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre?

The Project; Keystones 1&2

We kicked off this project by learning all about WWII. Who was fighting? What was going on post WWI? Great Depression era? What was Canada doing? And how do all of these events and a grave economic collapse lead to WWII? Good thing I took extensive notes on all these topics in class because now I have a bank of knowledge that I can refer to anytime. Here are examples of some of my notes;

In keystone 1, we used our understanding of the criteria for determining historical significance to ascertain the 3 most important reasons why WWII was significant either for Canada as a nation or Canada’s impact elsewhere. Luckily my extensive note taking was coming in handy because I immediately knew what I believed to be some very significant events. I ended up choosing my 3 to be, in no particular order, the Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of Dieppe, and Elsie Macgill’s manufacturing of Hurricane planes for the Allied airforces. In case you were curious about these events or why they are significant, here is my writing for keystone 1 – Historical Significance of WWII

Keystone 2 reintroduced us to elements of rhetoric that would help us write our final composition for this project. We had previously learned about ethos, pathos, and logos in a project from grade 8 so it was definitely time for a refresher to step up our game. Part 1 of keystone 2 had us analyzing a text to look for its usage of rhetoric to get the message across. I started off my analysis by annotating the text as I read it to try to catch any usage of ethos, pathos, or logos. This ended up making it much easier for me to write about when writing my analysis to hand in. The question to be answered for keystone 2 was “What is the author saying and what are the choices they made to effectively communicate that message?” and I saw many areas appealing to different rhetoric schemes but found the main usage to be that of  pathos, appealing to emotion. 

Keystone 2 Analysis

Writing Process

To solidify our message for our final writing composition, we needed to develop a thesis. I wanted to recognize the importance of the Juno Beach Centre representing Canada globally and bringing people together. The final thesis that I came up with was;

“It is important to have Canada represented on the world stage when it comes to WWII memorials like the Juno Beach Centre because it is preserving the memory of Canadian soldiers, promoting international understanding and cooperation, and calling attention to the shared history and values that unite Canada and its allies.”

And before we jumped straight into drafting, we also did some brainstorming to make the writing easier because we would already have laid out what we wanted to talk about or make points of. 

After that, we finally started writing drafts of our composition. I ended up making 4 drafts in total before landing my final copy. I utilized a plethora of feedback from my peers and teacher to mold my writing and fix any mistakes I made. I found it super helpful to have multiple sources of feedback because sometimes certain people would catch mistakes that others didn’t or have a new idea for wording something that I wouldn’t have thought of. 

Overall I am really proud of my final work and my performance through this project. So, why is it so important to preserve the Juno Beach Centre? Here is my answer in my final composition, “Commemorating Canada”. LINKKKKKK

As Always, Brooke

This War Did Not End All Wars

Howdy all, Welcome to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about a project called “A War To End All Wars: Graphically Told”. This project was about WWI, specifically Canada’s involvement, and the causes and consequences that came along with it.

Driving Question

“How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in WWI?”

You may remember that we did a comic book project last year in Scimatics called “The Body vs Bacteria”. And I still can recall almost all of the information that I put in that comic without even reading it. Now what that says to me is that I can retain information better when I draw/write it out in a fun way that is interesting to me. By choosing our own topics, it became more interesting to follow a story along and put effort into our work.

Causes and Consequences 

This is not the first project that has involved causes and consequences so this was a bit of a review for me. We learned about the definitions for cause and consequence and the difference between long term and short term. We then took a look at what the inciting causes were for WWI, and what consequences followed.

Building Knowledge

Before we got into our final topics for the project, we needed to form bit of a backstory about where we are in history. We learned about a bunch of different battles and how different countries came to be involved in the war. We also read a graphic novel called World War One: 1914-1918, which was told as a first person perspective from the war. We reflected on the novel and identified more causes and consequences. We also watched the film 1917 and compared it to the graphic novel. It was my second time watching the movie and that gave me more of a chance to notice all of the little details. We also read chapters from the Nelson Text about New Instruments of War, Precipitating Factors, Canada at War and Lasting Consequences. There were various worksheets that went along with these readings where we would rank the significance of certain events, weapons, etc. We also learned about how to create a good graphic novel and some new vocabulary that we would be using.

The Graphic Novel

Finally, we got to choose our top 3 topics to write our graphic novel on. I ended up getting Monchy-Le-Preux and I was quite happy with the topic. We immediately started doing research on our topics and what we like to call the 5 Ws; Who, What, Where, When, and Why. 

The finial product of this project was a short graphic novel (approximately 10-20 panels). So as a start to something that requires a story to be told, we started filling out story spines and storyboards. It was difficult to decide what to include in the story and which characters to portray. But eventually I started adding images and dialogue to my ComicLife and the story started coming together.

A lot of work went into the drawings and research so I am very proud to present to you my final comic book;

Conclusion

Overall, I think this project was super fun and i really enjoyed it. Wars are probably my favourite thing to learn about so I was super pleased to gain so much knowledge about WWI. I also gained a lot of skills on how to condense information into a story and got to work a lot more on my drawing and tracing skills. I cant wait to learn about WW2 next!

Thanks for reading.

As always, Brooke.

 

p.s. Here are some links that I used for information on Monchy-le-Preux;

The Rooms – Newfoundland Regt. War Diary 

The Vimy Foundation – Monchy-le-Preux

Govt. of Canada – Monchy-le-Preux