Life In New France

Our final humanities project has come to an end so naturally, we’d have to finish on a high note. It was weeks of putting in my best effort, and pushing myself to create the best possible work so I could complete grade eight humanities with a feeling that I did my best. To end the year off we studied what life was like in New France and artifacts from that time period; accompanied by our driving question “how can artifacts teach us about settlement, peoples, and life in New France?” We’d set to work learning all about New France and how to write a proper story. 

There were two competencies that we were being assessed on for this project and they were communicate, and evidence. For the communicate side of things it was all about sharing my ideas when I write, speak, and represent. I think I demonstrated a great understanding of this competency because I communicated my knowledge of New France in a variety of ways and wrote a thorough story that tells you what life was like back then. When we talk about the evidence competency it really means how we decide if evidence is worth learning about; I think I showed a good understanding in this because I only mentioned important parts of New France in my story while still being the sole focus.

Throughout this whole project there was no messing around, we just got things done. In my eyes the first milestone was really important as it got me into the creative mindset and storytelling mood. Our task was to choose an object that has meaning to us and write a story about how quarantine has affected us. I decided to focus on a guitar for multiple reasons, the first being that with all this time on our hands, taking up a new skill or relearning in my case is a great thing to do. The guitar also represents creativity and takes your mind off of the hard times we are going through. 

Swiftly came along milestone two and arguably the most important because it was our first opportunity to understand what people were like in this New World. The task at hand here was to tell a story from the eyes of a person living in New France. I created an Explain Everything and talked about a man named Antoine Dubois that was apart of the coeur de bois group. This piece of work is something that I am quite proud of because of how much I pushed myself. I used to that the app Explain Everything but I kept a growth mindset and told a short story about a man named Antoine. 

It was time we moved on from the storytelling aspect of the project and started focusing on the artifact. We found ourselves looking on historymuseum.ca for an artifact that caught our eye. There was so much variety but I was drawn by two, a telescope, and a compass, after a lot of consideration I decided to go with the compass. Now that I knew what artifact I was making a story on, I needed information about it so I found all the useful information such as where it was found, and when it was from. All of these helped me later on in telling a story based around this object. 

We had finally made it to the most important task, writing the story. All the things we’d done before this played a large role in making a story that actually has meaning and shows evidence of what life was like in the New World. I wouldn’t consider myself the most creative person out there so writing a full story without any guidelines was quite the challenge, but I persevered and wrote something that I thought had a good balance between creativity and historical significance. My story is about the life of a father and son that ventured over to New France and live life as a coeur de bois, however they find a compass that leads to something unexpected. Milestone five was basically apart of this one as it was just converting our story to Book Creator. Although I did put some thought into how I wanted it laid out and how my cover page would intrigue the reader. Despite the fact that my cover page is very simple, I think it is very powerful and to the point. 

To conclude, I found myself enjoying this project even though I don’t really enjoy reading or writing. However, it taught me how to write a story properly and format a story so the viewer wants to keep reading. Writing is something I want to improve at so this project was directing me the way I wanted to go. New France was a new concept to me, meaning I didn’t know much about it. I pushed myself to learn as much as I could about Canadian history and I learnt a lot of information that I didn’t know before. 

Thanks to all the teachers that have pushed me in humanities and especially Ms. Maxwell for taking me on this historic journey!