Louis Riel, A Metis Hero Or An Insane Rebel?

Welcome back to my Blog! Today we will be talking about my latest humanities project on Louis Riel. The driving question for this project was “How has the portrayal of Louis Riel changed over time?”. In order to answer this question we watched several videos and looked at primary sources and secondary sources to learn all of the background information. 

The Project

In the beginning we were split up into two groups so that half of class would be focused on enhancing our writing skills and the second on analyzing and creating notes on Louis Riel. The first investigation we did on Louis Riel was all about his role in the Red River Settlement. After learning his backstory we then looked at how he was portrayed in texts and in statues! Once of the sources we used was a Louis Riel Heritage Minute, after watching the video we wrote a praragraph in how he was portrayed.  For the writing half of class we used frayer models to come up with synonyms and super sentences. One of the frayer models we did was to do a word that you think Louis Riel was portrayed as. After using the frayer models to enhance our word choices we then talked about what makes up a topic sentence. To practice this we had to highlight our Heritage Minute paragraph. Once we finished all of our notes and writing we had to begin the final project which was a multi-paragraph response answering the driving question. The multi-paragraph took me 5 drafts before I could submit my final draft so it was a very long process. 

Here is my Heritage Minute Paragraph:

Here is my frayer model:

Here is my Multi-Paragraph Response Drafts:

My Final Draft:

What I Learned

I learned all about who Louis Riel was and how he played such an important role in Canadian history. Not only was Louis Riel and important role in Canadian history but he was also a very controversial figure. I learned the many ways Louis Riel rebelled and how that affected his portrayal. I also learned the basics of writing a meaningful paragraph and how my word choice affects my writing.

Overall this project was a very interesting and important topic to learn about. I am proud of my final work and I cannot wait to start humanities again next semester!