Hello again! This is my last ever Humanities post. Kind of crazy to think about it. Especially how all my posts have changed. I think now I’m a lot more reflective than before. Oh, look! I’m reflecting while talking about reflecting. That’s a whole new level of reflectiveness! Today I’m going to be talking about our last Humanities project of grade 8, Every Object Tells a Story! This was officially my favorite project of the year. I love writing, and this was all about it! In fact, I’ve been working on a short story called The Chick and the Unicorn. But anyways, this project was focussed on New France. Let’s start with the driving question!

What did the artifacts teach us about settlement, peoples, and life in New France? 

A pretty thoughtful question. Now of course, we had to build something to answer it. We all made “historical short stories.” Here’s mine:

Here is my beautiful book! Unfortunately, designing covers and things is not my strong suit, but this doesn’t look to bad.

And onto the Curricular Competencies

Communicate: How do I share my own ideas when I write, speak, and represent?  

Evidence: How do we evaluate evidence to decide if it is adequate to support a historical conclusion?

I’ll try and share how I think I did on these competencies in the following Milestones!

Milestone 1: Every Object

In this Milestone I chose an everyday object, like shoes, and then communicated how I thought it represented COVID-19. I’m really proud of this (although I handed it in late) because I thought my analysis was very creative. My evidence were my shoes, and I talked about how because of COVID, I don’t where them to school anymore.

Just as a side note, I’m very proud of how this photo turned out. Usually, I’m not very good at taking photos.

Milestone 2: Life in New France

In Milestone 2, I wrote a letter from the point of view of a seigneur from New France. I think that on the communicating competency for this Milestone I did really well. I really got into character of my Seigneur, and I enjoyed writing. I tried to write it like I imagined someone of a Seigneur’s status would sound!
Seigneur Letter

Milestone 3: Artifact Choice! And Research

This was definitely the most fun Milestone. We got to choose the artifact that we would base our stories around! The artifact I chose was a Jaw Harp! I think this Jaw harp is a good artifact because it looks like something from New France. I could imagine street musicians just twanging this instrument all through a village. I also chose it because I love music, and I wanted to include it into my story. This Milestone was really the big one for the Evidence competency. There was a lot of research involved, and I learned a lot about Jaw harps and bit of New France. I will talk about why just a bit later.

Milestone 5: Final Book Creator! 

YAY!!! I loved this Milestone. I loved writing the book, and then putting it into the app book creator. It really started to look like a real book in this Milestone. I’m proud of how I worked the Jaw harp into the story. If you want to read it, it’s up above. I like how the story wouldn’t be anything without the Jaw harp, but it’s not the center of what happens.

Now even though this project was fun, I’m not sure if I really succeeded. I’m proud of how I did on the Communicate competency, but the Evidence one… I didn’t understand what New France was until very late in the project. This meant that I chose my artifact without getting that New France was in Canada, and that’s why our national languages are French and English. I think I made up for this a bit in my story, but still. I went pretty far into the project before it all “clicked”. Oh well, I feel like now that I understand what New France is, I’ve learned a lot. And guess what?! This post is under 1,000 plus words! A new record. Oops, I better stop writing or it might not be true!

Thank you for a great year,

– Kate