Month: November 2023

TWO WORLDS WARS AND AN ESSAY!

Hello viewers welcome back to my blog, how are you doing today. I hope you are well, I myself am doing fine thanks for asking (I hope you asked or that was awkward). Today I’m going to be talking about my latest project all about WWII. This project is called Save Juno beach and was primarily about WWII’s historical significance to the world and Canada. But we also learned about many significant battles and events in WWII.

This project was primarily about learning and educating ourselves about WWII in order to write an essay about it for the final project. Since this blog isn’t a good place for me personally to teach I won’t be talking so much about WWII but rather about the different methods we used to learn about it. I will also talk a little bit about how we were taught about essay writing.

For the first few lessons we just went through slideshows about WWII but the first main thing we did was write a Point, Evidence, Explain paragraph or PEE for short. We were assigned to write about why WWII was started and learned about what makes a good PEE paragraph, this would be helpful later when we wrote our essays. Here is my work.

Point

One of the major causes of WW2 was the outcomes and consequences of WW1.

Evidence

Some of the reasons were because Germany was falling apart due to the outcomes of WW1 and the Great Depression, also there were new states in Eastern Europe that after WW1 were weakened and they were easy targets to Hitler.

Explain

After WW1 Germany didnt have any of the land they wanted or previously claimed however they lost the resources used to obtain those things. Because of this they had a failing economy and nothing to rebuild it or Germany. Another reason was that after WW1 there were many restrictions and sanctions put on Germany, due to the treaty of Versailles, which led to poverty, unrest and hatred towards the allies, Hitler saw this as an opportunity to sway the people of Germany into believing they could trust him and he built a nationalist party in this wake. Seeing as Germany had no resources of their own they decided the only solution was to take from other countries, and seeing as Eastern Europe had weakened countries and places such as Poland and France were easy pickings for Hitler.

Next up was a whole lot of learning about, you guessed it, WWII but instead of making it boring and just throwing information at us we got to participate in Kahoots to help us learn. The different kahoots we got consisted of, the interwar years, the start of WWII, Europe in the 1930s, D-day, the axis advances and pacific atlantic. It was through these kahoots that we built knowledge and educated ourselves on what actually went down in WWII.

Fast forward about 3 weeks we have now moved on from learning about WWII and we are onto learning about what historical significance is. Now, historical significance is (shockingly) a way to determine how significant historical events actually are and in order to help us we have an acronym, NAME, this stands for.

N otability, how notable something is has a huge impact on its historical significance.

A pplicability, how applicable is the situation today and how can we learn from it adds to its historical significance.

M emorability, how memorable something is changes how people remember it and it turn it become more historically significant.

E ffect, how big of an effect something has short term and long term can make it historically significant.

So that’s how you determine something’s historical significance, why don’t you try to think of an example and see how it does in all those categories…. Go on I’ll wait…. I’ll still be here when your done….

So now we move on to preparing for an essay. First thing we have to do is plan out different ideas in a brainstorm. I chose to make a mind map of 6 different potential topics and 2 reasons to back them up. Here it is.

 

And using those I crafted a thesis statement for my essay to be based of and stand by. My sentence was ‘WWII was historically significant because it changed the way the world worked and showed off how powerful Canada actually was and could be.’ This would be the basis of my whole essay.

After this we went onto the final step, making an essay outline, for each paragraph we wrote the main topic sentence and then 3 points to back it up. Here is a photo of my outline.

At this point all that left is to write my whole essay, even though I felt very overwhelmed with the thought of writing a whole essay in a day it wasn’t as scary as I thought thanks to my outline giving me the points to write about. You can imagine how upset I was though after hearing that we had to get it critiqued by a friend and the revise it but that too wasn’t so bad. At this point you must be dying to read my essay, if you are I don’t understand why but here you go. 

That’s about it for this project but first we have to look back and answer the driving question ‘Why is is so important to learn about. Canadas involvement in WWII?’ This is a very valid question, I’m sure every grade 10 student in Canada has asked. Well honestly I think it’s so we can know about what we have done in the past, it’s important to know that everything we have wasn’t just handed to us on a silver platter and we need to know that it was earned and achieved by the many soldiers that gave us our reputation through WWII to modern day. But that’s just what I think so if you have any different thoughts or disagree with me you can talk to my lawyer, you can find him nowhere because he doesn’t exist.

Thank you so much for reading my blog, I know this one was really wordy and I’m very sorry but this project didn’t have many things to take photos of and was mainly just a lot of learning and talking that couldn’t be described in words on a page. I hope you at least enjoyed my blog a little bit and why not come read the next one. But for now I’ll see you later. Goodbye!