Hey guys, welcome back to my blog! Today I’m going to be reflecting on my most recent project in Humanities, Save Juno Beach. This project was all about World War II. I learned lots about the causes and consequences of the war, and all about how the events of the war played out. Our finished product end was an academic essay. In this blog post, I am going to take a deep dive into the process it took to get me to the point where I had a finished product I was happy with. Let’s get into it!

For our first keystone, we learned all about many of the events of WWII, and then completed Kahoot quizzes to show our learning. There were 6 different Kahoots about different aspects of the war. In order to receive a proficient grade on the Kahoot quizzes, we needed to get a perfect score and get every question correct. I am happy with my learning on this keystone because I think I picked up on the facts when our teacher taught them in class, and anything that I missed, I picked up while doing the Kahoots. I feel that after this keystone, I had a strong understanding of the events that happened before, during, and after WWII.

After this, we got to work on narrowing down what we might want to include in our essay. At this point, we had still not written our thesis, so we had a wide range of options of what we could write about. In order to be able to narrow things down once we started brainstorming, we needed to strengthen our skills in determining historical significance. For this, we had a worksheet, pictured below, in which we determined the historical significance of WWII. In the worksheet, we looked at significant ways that this event could impact the world, and figured out how much that the statement applied. Here is my historical significance of WWII chart:

After we were confident in our abilities to figure out whether something was significant, we brainstormed topics for our essay. I chose to brainstorm using a useful app called MindNode. With MindNode, I could create a web of ideas branching off of one another. Here is my brainstorming:

After this, it was time to write our thesis. Here is the one I wrote: “It’s important to talk and learn about WWII because it helps people gain a better understanding of the world around them, which in turn helps them become better, educated, and more empathetic people.” I am quite happy with how my thesis turned out!

Next up, we created an rough outline for our final essays. Despite the fact that I thought I had a complete, full plan, my outline ended up being completely different than my final essay. Here is what my outline looked like:

Finally, it was time to write up my essay. I had multiple drafts, but in this blog post, I am only going to show you the final draft. Here is the link to my essay.

Overall, in this project, I think I learned lots about essay writing and researching. I am super happy with how my finished product turned out. I hope I’m able to apply these skills in other projects!

Thanks for reading,

Susan