Hello everyone reading this most amazing post.
It is me again, the owner of this blog, and today I’m going to learn you a thing or two about World War One. So sit down, grab a bowl of popcorn because this is going to be a long one. Let’s begin!
Let’s start way, way back in September 2017 when this unit was introduced to me.
We, as a class, where told we were going to learn about World War One, but before we could do that. we needed some exposition so we started learning about the Laurier Era.
The Laurier Era, for those that don’t know, started in 1896 when the first French-Canadian prime minister was elected. This led to many changes in Canada. Some for the better, like the advent of Canada’s “golden years” (the economic boom), and some for the worst, like the tension created between the English and French Canadians.
After the Laurier Era we discussed Europe and what it looked like pre World War One.We watched three videos on this subject. One was about Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria Hungary, and his assassination which some say started the war . The other two videos focused on the alliances that were created between the European countries as well as the Balkans, who were also important players in this war. Once we finished watching the videos, we were ready to create a mini drawing to represent different events from the videos. Here’s mine below:
So now you know about pre-war Canada and Europe, which is great, but how did the war start? Well, there are many different theories on why the war started. I happened to have already made a post about it so you can check that out below. Now you know how World War One started, why all of Europe was engulfed in it, and probably that this was happening far, far away from North America.
So why did Canada become involved? Well, Canada was heavily associated with the British Empire (because the British played a big role in the establishment of the country) and they technically “ruled” over Canada so we, really, had no choice but to eventually join the war effort. We could, however, choose how much we wanted to contribute to the war. Because Canada was reasonably fair at the time it didn’t place a military draft on its citizens…
Right away…
Instead. they decided to let soldiers volunteer to serve. They had an incredible turnout and sent 33,000 volunteers to train at the new camp at Valcartier near Quebec.
Let’s now talk about the soldiers who fought. What do you think was going on in the heads of the many Canadians fighting in World War One? We , as a class, read a short digital graphic novel about a solider in World War One. This was formatted into a diary type story in which a young Canadian volunteered to fight in World War One. We read this book for about a week and every chapter we had to fill out a little sheet about what we read. We then discussed the book in class. The questions where; 1) who did we meet in this chapter 2) what battles where mentioned 3) what key events happen in this chapter 4) which primary source interested/impacted you the most 5) create one quiz question for your group.
I put my answers for each question below.
The over all goal of this unit was to create a podcast about a Canadian soldier in World War One. The driving question was “How did World War One shape Canada’s identity as a nation?” To start us off, our teacher gave us a Link to a website containing information about thousands of Canadian soldiers. We were to pick our solider from this website. The more information on them the better. My solider was George Lawrence Price. He was the last Canadian to die in World War One, two minutes before the war ended. We then created the podcast with music we created in Garage Band.
The script took a wile to create. We started by creating a first draft for our script. After it was critiqued we started our second script draft then recorded it. Our hooks needed work so instead of doing a full second draft of the podcast we instead recorded only the first 30 seconds of it. Once that was critiqued we finished off my recording our final drafts.
This was a good unit, especially since I really enjoy learning about old wars. It taught me stuff I didn’t know about the war and allowed me to show my creativity through the podcasts.