Bonjour!
Our final project of 2024, that we presented in the Winter Exhibition was about revolutions!
To start this project we read the book Animal Farm, by George Orwell, which is actually a metaphor for the Russian Revolution. This book is about animals who revolt against their farmer and take over the farm, led by the pigs, who later start to act like humans and walk on their hind legs. We also participated in book chats, like discussion questions that we talked about in smaller groups. Here are some of the quotes and questions I prepared for one of the book chats.
We also learned about Crane Briton’s anatomy of a revolution, which is 4 stages that revolutions generally follow, Incubation, Moderate, Crisis and Recovery. To better understand this, we all made creative diagrams to represent the stages. I decided to compare it to the process of making and eating a pizza. Here it is:
After this we were put into groups based on what revolution everyone would like to learn about specifically. I got to do the French Revolution which was the one I was the most interested in, because I know a lot in the language but I don’t know very much about French culture. To begin, everyone separately researched their Revolution and created an infographic about it, organized by each stage of the revolution. I think that this was a very important step of the project for me, because I learned a lot that helped further in the project, like when I wrote the script or was presenting at the exhibition or just needed to look back to remember details. Here is my Infographic.
After this, everyone in the group shared their infographics and we made a list of the 6 or 7 most significant events during the revolution and then our group combined everyone’s ideas together to choose the 7 key events and a metaphor to represent them. Next, we started planning our Metaphor Machine, a Rube Goldberg machine with each part symbolizing an event from our revolution. My part was the execution of King Louis XVI and the end of the monarchy. To present this, a marble knocked the King piece and a few other pieces off of a chess board, just like how when you kill a piece in chess you remove them from the board. I had a few struggles making sure it was strong and didn’t keep falling apart, but in the end it worked okay. As well, I also had the task for writing a script and was the director of the documentary. I think I could have made sure that everyone was doing their parts for the documentary and ensured everything was done really well and in time and overseeing the process a bit more, because other than a bit at the exhibition, I actually never really got to see the full documentary.
To prepare for the exhibition, we made documents to plan food and costumes. We had baguette and brie and gouda (not a French cheese which is very offensive apparently ;P). For my costume, I was Marie Antoinette, King Louis’s wife. My friend and group member, Alva, was the king and Mika was the pope. Everyone else represented people from different social classes. Marie Antoinette was known for her funky hair styles, so I recreated this using a pearl necklace and feathers from when I used to have chickens!
We also had a few fun facts like ‘Marie Antoinette didn’t actually say let them eat cake, she said let them eat brioche (a sweet bread)’ and some not so fun facts like ‘A group of printing apprentinces massacred every cat they could find, and on trial the cats were guilty of witchcraft and hanged.’
During the exhibition, our set up and decor and food was pretty good, however our machine kept not working and breaking, and in the end we just kind of gave up. Next time, I think we could have had more back up plans for problem solving or tested it more if there was time. In conclusion I learned a lot about the French revolution and its effects. That’s all for this post!
Kaia out 😛
