Hello everyone!

This is officially the last humanities project for grade 8. This year has gone by way too fast, we’ve just started preparations for the spring exhibition and I don’t think it’s fully dawned on me that I’m almost in grade 9. That’s crazy! But, onto the project this project is called new beginnings and it was about the development of New France. The driving question was ‘what did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved?’ 

At the beginning of this project we were told that we were going to be making an ad about New France but, I can tell y’a now, we didn’t end up doing that. Why? You ask, well I’m not going to tell you know so you’ll jut need to keep reading to find out. 

Our entry event for this project was a Seycove advertising challenge it was basically just to refresh our brains on our advertising skills from the medium is the message project. We did a couple of drafts so here’s my final copy:

The next thing we did was watch a video about New France to get our brains going. The video we watched was called the story of us. It was basically a video about how New France came to be. 

Now that we had a very basic understanding of New France we did the iron chef protocol. The iron chef protocol is you get about 10 minutes to research a topic an then you had to present it to a panel of “judges” (which is just another group doing an accent here’s mine, I did les filles du roi:

New France People Iron Chef Protocol

Then we learned a bit more about the people who lived in New France and what it was like for them. To represent what we learned from this activity we created some sort of visual representation to show 4 different aspects of life. I chose to do a MindMap here it is:

 

Now we’re starting to get into the beginnings of our final product. We started this by researching a topic we would like to do for our final product I chose les filles du roi here’s my notes:

New France research – Filles du Roi

We also did some nature photography out in the forest but, I was sick so I did it in my backyard. We had to edit the photos we took and make them into a sort of ad here are mine:

Then we learned more about the first peoples trading and we also had to read a text and answer some questions to prepare for our fu trade simulation but I’ll get into that more later. 

Then we we’re supposed to do the trade simulation but we got carried away with the SACC but that’s not a part of this project so I’m not going to talk about it. We also updated our growth charts and learned about using evidence to tell a story.

Now it’s finally time for the fur trade simulation how it worked was we had table in a square formation with each side being a first peoples group or a trading company and the goal was to trade with the other group and gather their materials. We had a list of prices so we knew how much to trade. The currency used was beaver pelts, I’ll put a diagram of the tables and such here: (I was Ouendat)

Now that we had even more knowledge about the fur trade we worked on our final images which are not ads. I’m not 100% sure why we decided to not do an ad but I think it’s because New France wasn’t a very nice place to live and I don’t think our teachers really wanted us to advertise that people should go there. Even though we didn’t create ads we did create a flourish visual which I will include in this post. 

Next we got into the final steps of this project which was a peer critique of our final ads here the critique I got. Thanks Charlie M for the critique.

Now we’re done we finished up our visuals and wrote out an explanation of what each symbol on the image represented. I just realized that I completely forgot to explain what this final product is so, basically it’s an image from 2 perspectives of people from New France. For mine I chose to do les fille du roi v.s the king/men of New France. Now without further ado here’s my final image and explanation: (use your finger or mouse to move the slider on the image)

Explanation:

I chose to represent les filles du roi which translates to the king’s daughters. I chose to represent the perspectives of the men/the king who the filles were married to/indebted to and I also chose to represent the perspective of the filles.

The darker more gloomier photo is the filles perspective as when they came to New France most of them were orphans or poor or widowed ect… so, they were most likely scared about where they were. The devil horns represent how I believe they felt about home. Because they were mostly used to make children I don’t think they viewed their house as much of a home. The ring is meant to symbolize how probably not all the marriages were super happy marriages because a lot of them were arranged so they probably weren’t the happiness or most loving marriages. The children that are crying are meant to represent how the filles had lots of children and according to most adults I’ve talked to raising one or two children is hard to do so trying to raise ten or more would probably not be very fun.

The lighter image is meant to represent the king’s/mens perspective. I made it lighter because I think that the men would have had a lighter more jolly perspective because they had more freedom and choice in New France. The doves on the image are meant to represent the filles advertised purity. It would make the filles more desirable if they were ‘pure’ (virgins). The crown represents the king and his support of their move from France to New France. I put this in the light perspective and not the filles because I think that the king would want more fame because he’s the king and the filles might not have viewed him as the best of people due to the not very pleasant voyage to New France. I put the crosses on this image because the most prominent religion at the time in New France was Christianity so I wanted to represent that, as it’s such a big part of society at the time. I also put the roses there because they further represent that level of purity and the ‘Christian wife’ that cooks, cleans, and raises children but barely gets any credit.

   

Thanks for reading – Sydney🙃