Over the past few weeks in humanities we have been learning about WW1 and how it changed the world in many ways. To start off before spring break we had a sort of mini project to get us ready. In this we would read a novel that had something to do with World War One. I chose war horse because the story was supposed to be great and told through a horses eyes. I also chose to do a picture book report by finding pictures and relating them to the book with a small paragraph.

 

After learning all about that we were about to start a super interesting and cool project but before we did that we needed to learn some more basic info about WW1. To do this we watched a guy called Indy Niedel on YouTube. He has a great channel that showcases a video for every week of the war. Here’s one of his videos just to show how interesting and captivating his talking can be.

Anyways, the project is our WWI comic books. Everyone in my class of PLP  would choose a topic in WW1 we would then make a five page comic. 1 title page 3 pages of info and 1 page of a story from someone in your topic. When done, everyone would compile theirs together and we would have the WW1 comic book.

At the very beginning of this project when we were just learning about WW1 we went to Ottawa (I won’t go into detail here, go read my other post about it) and got first hand experience in our capital with WW1. In Ottawa we learned almost everything that we had to to be able to start out comic books. Our next step was to start our actual project. This involved lots of preliminary research. Eventually I decided to go with Passchendaele as my topic because I thought it had lots of interesting points that many other topics didn’t have. After choosing I did days and days of research to find out not only details of the battle, but research on the people in and around it and how it affected them. Eventually I knew fully what I was going to do and I was ready to move on to the next step, the book creation.

To create my book I used an app called comic life. It was slightly glitchy and old but it was tailored to create comics in a way no other app was which is why it was so useful. Originally, I was going to go with a muddy theme for my book (Passchendaele is known as the battle of the mud) but I found out that a metal or war theme looked way better.

My war story was going to be about a private who fought in the battle, known as Edgar Patton. In training he would write in his diary and back home to Canada about how training was so nice and how he couldn’t imagine the war being that bad. Soon he was put to the front lines and eventually he presumably died of sniper fire in the trenches. After my first revision, I realized how much better my comic book could really be. Off the next week or so our class would just be doing revisions and then peer reviewing and then revisions again. 

When we were fully finished it was time present our final product to the world. Or in this case, the grade seven and six classes in a nearby elementary school. We each had to present to about 4 kids three times, so in total we were presenting to 12 kids which I thought was pretty cool because in 1 hour you could teach 12 kids about WW1. The actual presenting went pretty smooth and overall, kids were interested in what I had to say. When we were done it felt pretty good be able to say you taught 12 kids about WW1, even if it was just a little.

Looking back on this project I think that it really helped learn not only about WW1 but it helped improve my presenting skills too because of all the revision. If I could do it over, I would probably do two thing differently. First, I would let the kids select the topics that they want to do so they would be more interested. Some of the kids definitely cared but some didn’t really care that much. Secondly, I wouldn’t have made a list of topics to choose from. I felt like it almost confined you into a different topic than you might want to do (although I liked mine). You were allowed to go outside the list but I felt like I I spent more time finding a topic, I might fall behind. One thing I really like about this project is that in your own comic book you had ultimate creative freedom and it really let you choose what suits you. Overall, this was a really fun, interesting and new way to learn about WW1.