Our past unit in humanities was World War One. WWI is a huge topic to cover in just three months, but somehow we did it.

War Horse

We started off this unit by reading one of three books; War Horse, Private Peaceful, or Generals Die in Bed. As you can probably tell, I chose war horse. The book is about a horse that was separated from his mother when he was young. Joey (the horse) is bought by a family to be a farm horse. At first joey doesn’t like his new home, because Albert’s father comes home drunk and hurts Joey. However, as time goes on Joey forms a strong bond with Albert, but his happiness doesn’t last long, because Albert’s dad threatens to sell Joey if he doesn’t start ploughing. Albert really doesn’t want to say goodbye to Joey, so he trains him every day until his father will “keep him”, but their family is struggling financially because of Albert’s dad’s drinking problem. So Albert’s dad ends up selling Joey to the army. The rest of the book goes on to talk about Joey in the war. Once we finished this book, we made a book report over spring break. We chose between 5 options for our book report (but we could also come up with our own). I chose the book soundtrack for my book report. The songs I chose were tears in heaven by Eric Clapton, and Wildfire by Michael Murphy.

Ottawa

For this unit we went to Ottawa with ENCOUNTERS WITH CANADA. Our week was based around the battle of Vimy Ridge, but we learned about more than just that. We learned about a lot of different battles within WWI.

Comic book

Once we got back from Ottawa it was time to start on our comic books. Before we started to create them however, we read an online graphic novel called Shattered Ground. Reading it let us see what war was like for the people involved in it, and how much of an emotional toll it took on people. Before we left for ottawa we were told to think of a topic about WWI that we wanted to make our comic on, and I picked shell shock. I picked this because it seemed really interesting when it was brought up, but it was never really properly explained. So I naturally wanted to figure out more about it. EMILY and I were both making our comic about shell shock, so we decided that she would make her comic about the stigma around shell shock, and I would make mine about the treatment. I put a lot of time, and research into this project. I put a lot of work into each draft of my comic book. Since i spent so long researching I didn’t have to change any of my facts which was nice. After everyone was done their comic, we put them all together into a book. You can read my comic below. 

Presentation

At the beginning of this project we were told that we were going to be presenting to a group of 7th graders. We made our comic book with the question “how can we tell the story of WWI through visuals and text?” We ended up presenting to a large group of grade 6’s and 7’s. The groups that I presented to were genuinely interested in what I was talking about. It was fun to be able to present to them, and after we even gave them their own copy of the book. This was a really fun way to end off a really fun unit.