“We must be the great arsenal of Democracy.”
In this project we focused on WWII with the driving question “What did the conflict of WWII play in shaping Canadian indentity?” We first obviously has learned about WWII, where we covered significant events like The battle of Diepe, Pearl harbour, D-Day, and the Holocaust, and more. But we had into just learned about the battles but a lot about the other parts of the war. We learned quite a lot about the politics, especially Canadian and British, as those correlated most with the DQ (Remembering that Britain still had massive amount of control over canada). We learned about how Churchill was very influential to the war from start to Finnish, even before he was prime minister. This was a very important project because it taught us about WWII, but also because we had a very powerful end goal, which I will explain in depth later.
At the beginning of this project, we would be put into 2 different groups, where we would have a different focus each day. One day we would focus on the history of WWII, and make our notes for essay, and in the other class we would focus on our second product, our notion of service, and later our smart brevity note format. The notion of service was for us to do an hour of service work, funded by a patron for 10 dollars, to raise money to fly a flag at Juno beach Center dedicated to the Royal Canadian legion. Once we had planned out and completed our acts service, we learn about a form of taking notes called smart brevity notes, which are a system for taking more effective notes. Smart brevity will take a regular article, and highlight its main features, e.i by the numbers, deep dive, why it matters. Each of these points give you the most relevant point, that is concise and usable. Combined these notes with our teaching on WWII, we were able to create notes that would make it easy to apply into an essay. Once we had our notes it was a matter of writing our thesis’s and then starting the essay. My essay took me a couple of days and was just over 1000 words. With our essay written we just had to go through rounds of both peer and teacher critique, until they were fully correct, for us to FINALLY be able to put our zine format, were we would print and send them along with our flag to the Juno beach center in France. My favourite part of this project was both the writing of the essay and turning it to the zine. I found it enjoyable to see my work grow and be turned into a final product that had the quality of work to be send across the world.
Overall I really enjoyed this project because it gave us a great way to show what we had learned about, but also try to teach more to others about Canadas comment and influence during WWII, as we were overlook still in that era. It was also a great project for us to learn MLA formatting on even if it was a pain to start out with. Another great aspect of this project was our introduction to Smart brevity notes, and the power they hold for this type of work. It led me to easily find topics we had talked about in depth, and start points for topics that we had not talked about as much. I think that I could have improved on being more organized with planning out days for research and writing and not having them happen on the same day, adding more stress.
That was all from this post, thank you for reading, and until the next one.
Jannik