This might have been my favourite socials project yet. As a lot of people know I really enjoy history regarding 20th Century conflicts and in this project I got to focus specifically on WW1.

I knew we were going to be learning about it this year and leading up to term 3 and I was really excited to start doing this. We started by reading 1 of 3 different books over the spring break. I chose to read Generals Die In Bed by Charles Yale Harrison. This was to get us into the idea of the First World War and have us learn a bit and get ourselves used to the event. The book follows a Canadian soldier as he fights in France during the First World War. We see him and his friends in all roles of the war. After this we made a book report where we got to pick one of five different tasks to do. I chose to get 3 different songs which I thought captured the tone of certain parts of the book.

A French Renault FT

After we did this we made a political cartoon where we dived into the start of WW1. We learned about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the chain of events that led to the start of the First World War. Another big part of this was a brief trip to Ottawa where we learned about Canada’s development and role in the First World War with Encounters with Canada.

Then we were told about our actual project where we would make a comic book to show to a grade 6 and 7 class. We got to pick a topic for our pages which we would inform our audience about. I chose WW1 era tanks and made 5 pages in comic life explaining the topic I chose.

I had a title page, 3 different informational pages and a story page at the end. The title was standard in font and layout as everyone needed to have it look the same. For the rest of the pages I could pretty much do whatever I wanted. Each of the 3 informational pages focused on a topic in relation to the tanks and used pictures and text to explain the topic. I chose to do the first tanks introduced in the war, how tanks were used and interesting tanks from the war.

For the story I chose to write about the crew of the Fray Bentos. This British mk5 and its crew were stranded near enemy lines and had to defend their tank for 3 days straight. All but one of the crew survived the encounter. We went to Cove Cliff recently to present these comics and all of the grade 6s and 7s seemed to enjoy my book. I even got to talk to a few people who had a similar interest in armoured warfare.

Finally we read and reviewed the comic shattered ground which followed Canadian soldiers in the First World War. This socials project has been one of my favourite projects this year and I am so excited for WW2 next year.