It’s that time of year again when we finish a unit and write a reflection on it. So the topic for this post is exploration. This past unit was all about the new world and people exploring these new places. To get an understanding of this we did a series of guided notes that taught use about the nations that were sailing and what their motives were. We learned about the Bering Strait and all the different types of people such as the Norse, the Portuguese, and the Chinese. Most of these voyages’ motive was to find new land for farming or to find new goods and luxuries for trade. We watched a heritage minute on this which was so cool and well done.

The next thing we were told to do was to read comic books as our big project for this unit involved creating a comic. Every table group was given a group of comics to read every week. My table group included Paisley, Jason, Caleb, and Luciano. The groups of comics were Tintin, Superhero, Anti-hero, and New Age. While reading the comics we had to fill out a comparison chart to find the similarities and differences between the different genres. Overall my favourite one was the Superhero comics because I’ve always liked the stories and characters. Reading the comics was a lot of fun because I always knew that something exciting was going to happen. The anti-hero comics were similar however they were very similar to each other where as the superhero ones had a lot of variety in story.

After we were all set to do our work on the comics we started learning about the slave trade. We did an activity where we read multiple different stories from five different people’s perspective of the slave ships. After reading all of them we had to decide if it was biased and if it was and why it might be like that.

The next part of the project required us to think of why we would like to go on a voyage and have it tie into our worldview. I said that I would want to travel to places like Pakistan where women aren’t treated equally in order to help them and film a documentary showing the world how horrible it is. A big part of my worldview is about equality for women so I thought this would be the perfect time to express that. Once we had finished all of the iTunes U posts it was time to start creating our comic. Each table group was given a place where explorers came from and we each had to pick an explorer from there. My group got Spain so I picked Hernando de Soto. The big idea of the project was that you are pitching your new voyage to the king and queen and are showing why they should fund you using examples from the time you sailed with your famous explorer. My name was Philipe and I had to take over Hernando’s voyage to the Mississippi after he died.

I really enjoyed this unit for many different reasons. Since my teachers were away for a lot of the time we worked on it, it had to be a very self led project which I liked a lot. I could plan everything out and feel really on top of everything. I also really enjoyed reading the comics because as a kid I never read comics. They were a lot of fun to read and it was cool comparing the different styles. Overall I would love to make a comic again as it was a lot of fun.