World War One soldier project

Since school has started in September, we have been learning about the history of Canada kind of starting off in the time period where we left off from in grade 9. Recently, we went onto learning about what part Canada played in the World War 1 as well as their contributions to this war. This unit was based around one question “How did World War One impact Canada’s identity?” We started off by learning a little bit about life in Canada before the war started like the Laurier era. As well as the economy at the time and human rights between Laurier’s years as a prime minister from 1896 to 1911.

This lead us onto learning about what Europe was like prior to the War by watching a couple of videos about different alliances as well as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. Throughout these videos we created visual notes on Paper 53 to represent some of the main ideas throughout the video as well as show our understanding of what Europe was like before World War One (although the videos we watched were very fast paced so at times it was pretty hard to keep up). Here are my visual notes:

We then went on to read “An Assassination of Peace” which was about different ideas by four people of why the war started. These people included G. Herschfeld who believed it was The Alliances that started the War, J.J. Remak who believed everyone was to blame for the War, R.J. Evans who believed it was the nationalism as well as the Balkans and A. J. P Taylor who believed the cause for the War was everyone expanding their weaponries and wanting to have more power relative to the other countries. You can read more about this as well as my opinion on my other blog post here.

After this, we then went on to learn about why Canada entered the war by filling out some questions and watching some videos. We learned that because Canada at the time was still part of the British Empire when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914 meant that they were by definition automatically part of the War. Canada was a crucial part to Britain’s success in the war by supplying Britain with not only military supplies but much more such as Canadian wheat and beef. Also, over 420,000 Canadian soldiers were recruited to fight overseas during the 4 years of war which was almost 1/16 of the population of Canada at the time.

We then went on to reading a comic called Shattered Ground, which tells the story of four Canadian men who went to war and their experiences throughout the war. The story starts off with a boy named Kevin who finds a bunch of letters and pictures as well as a diary from his great grandfather who was in the war and relives some of the adventurous moments. What was really good about this novel was throughout the story there were real pictures from the war as well as videos to help the readers understand more clearly about what happened during the war. During the reading we answered a couple of questions about each chapter, these questions included:

1) Who did we meet in this chapter?
2) What battles were mentioned?
3) What key events happened in this chapter?
4) Which primary source interested / impacted you the most? Explain. 5) Create one quiz question for your group – know the answer.

Here are my answers for all questions throughout the six chapters:

After learning about the story about one Canadian soldier, we went on to learn about some of the big battles during the war such as The battle of the Somme and Vimy Ridge. We did this by reading some information on Canada’s part in these battles then filled out a chart on the different battles as well as answered a couple of questions on the battles.

Here is the chart:

Here are the questions:

Following the battles, we then went more into depth about the battle of Vimy Ridge by watching a video that would help us answer the questions or give us a better idea about how the War and Canada impact:

• war technology
• what is the benefit of primary sources in this format?
• the scope of people and countries involved
• how was Canada’s identity impacted by WWI?

With these questions in our head, we also wrote down some notes about anything we found interesting about the video such as facts or names of important people etc. Here is the chart that I filled out which also includes some questions at the end that everyone would be creating and we would then be discussing in class:

We also learned about “Life on the Homefront” which is what it was like back home for the people in Canada during the war. For women, it was a change because many of the men left their jobs to go to war and the women became bankers, factories workers and worked at many other jobs. This was a step towards equality in Canada as women before the war were usually mothers, and teachers. The war also opened up voting rights for women and by the end of the war many women were allowed to vote.

 

After this, we did a mini group project which was more in depth about “Life on the Homefront” by reading about either voices for peace, recruitment and conscription, the war economy, enemy aliens and government interventions. We then had to make a keynote and present it to the class. My group was tasked with creating one for the economy during the war.
Here is my group’s keynote:

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Throughout the process of learning about Canada’s impact on the War, we started the big project that would be helping to answer our unit question how did World War 1 impact Canada’s identity? The project would be creating a podcast about a soldier in World War One and use their story to help answer this question. We started off by looking for a soldier to do the podcast about, by researching Canadian soldiers with good primary sources such as documents that would have enough information to create a 5-6 minute podcast. On top of this, we also had to create our own music to make it an interesting and intriguing podcast.

My first instinct for this project was to ask my parents if anybody in our family was a Canadian during the time of the First World War but unfortunately there wasn’t as my mum’s side was living in Britain and my Dad’s side was from Sweden. I ended up finding a soldier named Leo Clarke who had a lot of documented information and was someone who interested me as he seemed like someone who put his life forward for his country from what I had read.

 

To get inspiration to write a script as a class we watched a bunch of different podcasts that had different themes as well as wats of telling the story. One of my favourite ones that we listened to was Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist history which I found very intriguing and interesting to listen to. After doing a bunch of research as well as listening to these podcasts we went on to create our script for our own podcast:

For the first draft of my podcast I got some feedback from my teacher which included making the podcast answer the driving question as well as some more general feedback to the class about telling a story instead of just listing off the events in Leo Clarke’s life. We could do this by my tone of voice, the music and many other factors, Here is the feedback and corrections:

I then created my first draft my recording myself reading my script as well as adding my own music I created then editing it all together. Here is my first draft:

we then showed our podcast to someone else in the class to get feedback about what we could do better and improve on:

After taking the feedback, we then made a 30 second intro that would be shown to the class instead of creating the full 5-6 minute second draft. This helped us create our next draft as we got specific feedback from a bunch of different people’s point of view. Here is my first 30 seconds:

For my 30 second intro, the feedback was to change my tone of voice as it wasn’t intriguing or inviting as it is a little daunting at times to record. As well I was given feedback to use pauses to my advantage. I definitely tried to use this helpful feedback to my advantage when creating my final draft.

As for my final draft I wanted it to sound more natural and less scripted while still having a script before recording my final draft. So I edited my script and read over it multiple times to become more comfortable with what I was saying. It is pretty similar although I cut out a part as it didn’t have much relevance to the story I was trying to tell about Leo Clarke and how World War One helped shape Canada’s identity. Here is my script for my final draft:

Once I finished the script, I then went onto create more music throughout the podcast so that I have different music during different parts. I then recorded myself which to be honest was the longest part of the project as I wanted to get it close to perfect. After the recording I then cut it all together and edited it. Here is my final draft of my podcast:

Overall I think this was a fun unit as I really enjoy learning about historical events and I find it very interesting. In the end if I come back to this podcast I could probably always make it better but I’m proud of my final product especially the music as I thought that would be one of the most difficult parts. I’m excited to see where the history of Canada takes us next, with our next project taking us into the interwar years.