Hello, welcome back to my blog! I am here to talk about my latest project in Humanities: New Beginnings. “What’s that supposed to mean?” You might be asking. I was too. “New Beginnings” refers to the establishment of New France in 1608.

The driving question for this project was “What did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved?” 

This year has been a wild ride. This will be my last grade 8 Humanities blog post. That’s pretty crazy. It’s almost over!

ANYWAYSSSSSS

Let’s get into the project.

For this project, one of the first things we did was watch a video. It was all about the establishment of New France. It was called “The Story of Us.”

We also did something called the Seycove Advertising Challenge. In this assignment, we made ads for Seycove and why you should come. This was to reignite our advertising skills from our past project, The Medium is the Message. This is because originally, we were planning to make an ad for New France. We ended up making something different, but you’ll see that later on.

Another thing we did was our Evidence Vocabulary sheet. For this, we had to do different things that could represent evidence and what the word means. For example, we had to do a drawing that represents evidence. In mine, the word has water dripping off. At first, it’s just small drops, but they fall into a big puddle. This represents the word because you have many small pieces of evidence that all add up into one big conclusion, just like how the water droplets all add up into one big puddle.

Along the way, we practices some of our photography skills that we learned back in our past project Constructing Creative Communication.

Of course, we had to throw in a simulation! This was definitely one of the highlights of this project for me. We basically reenacted the fur trade. There were four groups: the Ouendat, the Haudenosaunee, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the Northwest Company. I was in the Hudson’s Bay company. In the end, the simulation got very chaotic. Hudson’s Bay had the gun, which meant that Hudson’s Bay had the power.

Last but most definitely not least, I have my final product: my visual. These are two images, comparing different perspectives on a certain thing. My subject was survival in New France. On the one side, getting food was much easier because there was a huge amount of farmland. On the other side, it’s cold, and diseases spread around like wildfire because of it.

Overall I think I performed well in this project. I’m really proud of my final visual and my evidence vocabulary sheet.

Thank you for reading this post!

Hey guys, welcome back to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about probably one of my favourite projects in Humanities so far. It’s called The Renaissance: A Change Engine. The driving question of this project was “What significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today?” Obviously, since this project was about the Renaissance, we’re only looking at developments from then.

In this project, our two main final products were a paragraph and a triptych about the societal changes, people, artworks and inventions we considered to be the most historically significant. Here’s my triptych:

The four things I chose were:

-The iconic artwork “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci

-The societal change which was access to libraries and educational materials

-The invention of clocks

-Famous artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci

The all related to modern day things. The four modern day things I would associate with my four renaissance things are:

-NFTs

-Technology which can easily show us information

-Technology that can easily let us tell time (cell phones, smart watches)

-Elon Musk

I am happy with my work on this assignment and I believe I accomplished it.

My other piece, my paragraph, was a persuasive paragraph on why clocks are the most historically significant invention of the Renaissance. Here is my paragraph:

The single most historically significant invention from the Renaissance still lives with us and is used daily by people around the world. It is one of the most universal items in history, an invention that can be recognized by pretty much any person alive who has been born since its creation. What is this amazing, crazy invention you may ask? Clocks. Yes, those insignificant things on your walls that you glance at every 5 minutes waiting for whatever is the most significant invention of the Renaissance. If you disagree with me, read on. If you agree with me, read on. If you have any opinion on this, continue reading, because whether or not you agree with me, I’m going to tell you why I think this. Before I tell you that, though, I’m going to tell you a little bit about the history of time measurement (yes, I know, you’re probably bored already because pretty much everyone knows this or doesn’t want to. But this is necessary for context.) The measurement of time started with sundials. While this was pretty good to use, it was finicky and only worked under certain conditions. For example, it didn’t really work at night, or if it was too cloudy and the light was spread, causing there to be no shadows. Plus, the entire thing had to be unobstructed, so if you lived in a forest, say bye to that! After the sundial came the hourglass era. Yes, yes, very interesting, I know. Anyways, hourglasses just really didn’t do what was needed, so eventually in the 14th century some guy named Peter Henlein came along and finally invented the first mechanical clock. So that’s our little summary of the history of time measurement for you. Basically some random German locksmith came along and said “this isn’t good enough” as all inventors do, and so he made a clock. Moving on, I think that the invention of clocks is the most historically significant invention from the Renaissance because it creates structure in society and life in general. For example, working and being paid by the hour was pretty much impossible at that point, because no one knew when the hour was. Anything on a specific timed schedule couldn’t consistently be done properly. Individual activities had no timed structure, and it was hard to set something up with an “I’ll meet you at the end of the street at 10:35.” Getting an exact time for anything was impossible. The second reason I think that the clocks were the most significant invention of the Renaissance is because they are the fuel of huge multimillion dollar companies today such as Rolex. My third reason is that it is so applicable to the modern day, where crazy new technology is being invented every day (for example, the device that you’re reading this on.) Smart watches, which are becoming more and more prominent in everyone’s daily lives, wouldn’t exist without the invention of wristwatches, and wristwatches wouldn’t exist without the invention of clocks. So, to sum everything up, clocks are the most historically significant invention from the Renaissance because they lead to the creation of so many important things now, and they add a lot more structure to society and to everyone’s daily lives. So, supporters of the printing press being more important: beat that! 

I think I extended on this assignment because I connected with the reader in a unique way without straying from the main idea of my paragraph.

One activity I enjoyed was the Renaissance simulation at the start of the project, where we pretended to live in those times. At the start of the activity, we were assigned a societal role. The different roles were serfs, knights, lords, and monarch. We quickly learned how much your role in society impacted your life back then, even when it was out of your control. For example, I was a lord, and I enjoyed sitting on a comfortable chair, while all the serfs were stuck on the ground.

One big thing I loved about this project was what we learned in using the photo editing app SuperImposeX, since I love technology. During our time at Loon Lake, I learned how to put an image over another and remove the background, which helped me with my triptych.

Near the end of the project, we were looking at different artworks from the Renaissance and I learned about a cool feature within Google Arts & Culture. This was the feature that allows you to see a piece of are in AR (Augmented Reality.) Because of this, I got to take a photo with the Mona Lisa.

Now, to answer the driving question. What significant developments emerged from the past and how do they impact us today? One significant development that emerged from the past was the Mona Lisa. It’s well known around the world despite being created over 513 years ago. Another was the invention of clocks. It impacts us today significantly, allowing us to easily see the time and introduce important things for society such as pay by the hour and a base for the huge watch industry. 

Thank you for reading this blog post. I hope you learned something or at least have come away knowing which development from the Renaissance is the most historically significant (hint: it’s the invention of clocks!)

Image Source

A lot of people dislike writing and/or poetry, so for this post I will be telling you why writing isn’t as bad as you think. In this post, I will list 5 reasons why writing and poetry can be used for good and counter arguments to yours on why it’s bad.

1. Writing and/or poetry is a great outlet. Any ideas you have? Create something with writing or poetry! Want to organize scattered thoughts? Write them down! Want to tell people information? Write it and give it to people!
2. Writing and poetry are great for entertainment. It helps distract people, whether they’re reading the finished product, or just writing it.
3. It’s fun! Especially when creative writing, because you get to make up cool stories where there are literally no rules/laws, but even other types of writing can be fun, especially when you’re passionate about the topic.
4. You can express yourself. Poetry and writing are yet another way to express who you are and your personality. When you do this, others can read it and have a better time understanding you and how you work.
5. It’s really not as bad as you think, you just need to learn how to write about topics you like. For example, if your favourite animals are cats and you hate dogs, but you’re writing about dogs, then you’re quite likely to dislike writing about dogs. But, if you were writing about cats, you would probably enjoy it!

In conclusion, I believe that people don’t think writing is bad, they just don’t like writing about the topics they’re writing about. Because really, what’s not to like?

Hi, and welcome back to my blog. Assuming you read the title of this post, you probably have some questions. Firstly, how the heck is the book “The Outsiders” relevant to worldview? Secondly, what is “The Outsiders?” You will find out this and more in this post. 

First of all, I’m going to provide you with the driving question and an outline of what I will be talking about in this post. You should appreciate that. I am very generous. The first thing I will do in the post is give a very quick summary of “The Outsiders” and show the definition of worldview. This way you will know what I’m talking about when I name scenes, characters and different aspects of worldview. Then, I will talk about a few assignments we did within the project. After that, I’m going to talk about how the two relate. I’ll then talk a little bit about the winter exhibition and show some photos and videos. Finally, I’m going to answer the driving.

The driving question for this project was “How can the Outsiders teach us about worldview?”

We worked in groups. My group was: Keira, Mackenzie, Callum, and Daniel. Check out their blogs!

The Outsiders

The Outsiders is an old novel written by author S.E. Hinton. It follows the story of Ponyboy and the chain reaction set off by Darry (his brother) getting mad at him, and socs (the upper class) hating greasers (the lower class). When Darry got angry, Ponyboy went outside and found Johnny. Johnny and Ponyboy got jumped by socs, and the socs tried to drown Ponyboy. In order to save his life, Johnny killed Bob (the soc.) Johnny and Ponyboy ran away and stayed in a church for a week. At the end of that week, the church caught fire and Johnny and Ponyboy had to save kids from the fire. As a result, Johnny ended up hospitalized, and died. Dally (a good friend of theirs) ran away because of this, and died because he pointed a gun at a policeman and the policeman killed him. After this, Ponyboy was traumatized (obviously,) but he still needed to keep up with school. So when he was assigned an essay, he wrote about his experiences.

My Work

One of the assignments I had was to make a movie poster for The Outsiders. The economy aspect of worldview is demonstrated, regarding privilege and money, which are a huge part of the economy and society as a whole.

Another assignment we had was our worldview MindNode. This is basically a mind map of the different aspects of my worldview.  

How do worldview and “The Outsiders” involve each other?

This was a very popular question among me and my friends. Why did we read “The Outsiders” to learn about worldview? Why didn’t we read another book? Well, “The Outsiders” ties in very well to worldview because of all of the different points of view. On top of that, many outside things are influences many of the characters’ worldview in drastic ways. For example, when the socs jumped Johnny (the first time, before the instances in the book) Ponyboy began to view the socs as much more barbaric than he originally thought. His brothers, Darry and Soda, also influenced his worldview. Darry raised him to think, “greaser good, soc bad.” All in all, “The Outsiders” provides us a different point of view and an easy way to see how other’s actions can influence how you see the world.

The Exhibition

For this project, we did a presentation at the winter exhibition. We presented a tableau. A tableau is a still image. An easier way to describe it is a freeze frame. It’s almost as if you’re watching a scene and time stops. Our tableau was the court. We had to do two tableau’s: one from the original book, and one that’s been transposed into 2021. For example, our first tableau was the courtroom, with the judge closing the case. In the 2021 version, we had a social worker talking about the same things. For our tableau we created multiple props. This included a zoom call frame and an American flag (for the courtroom.) 

This post started with the driving question, and it’s also going to end with the driving question. How can the Outsiders teach us about worldview? Well, the Outsiders can teach us about how certain things influence worldview, such as experiences (Johnny getting jumped,) society (the greasers vs socs,) and many other things. We can also see that everyone has a different worldview due to experiencing different things that influence it. In conclusion, the Outsiders can teach us about worldview by showing different experiences that everyone’s gone through and how that changes who they are as a person as well.