The Great War

We just finished off our last project of the year, which was about WW1. It’s kind of crazy that the school year is pretty much over already, but then again, it has been a crazy year. Moving on to the project, it was about WW1, with the driving question of “How can exploring stories and text help us understand the impact of WWI on Canada’s identity?” So let’s get right into the project.

One milestone that I think really showed my Comprehend competency (What literacy skills am I using to read, listen, and view texts for understanding?) was the book pages we had to create. For this project, we were creating a whole book on WW1, and each of us were doing a couple pages with a certain topic and a soldier. My topic was WW1 propaganda, and the soldier I did was Private George Lawrence Price. I had to do a lot of research beforehand and use different literacy skills to understand the complicated topic that was WW1 propaganda, which I think demonstrates the Comprehend competency pretty well. As for the soldier I had to research, it wasn’t as complicated if a subject, but I did have some trouble finding out more information about him.

As I mentioned before, everyone had to do their own book pages, which ended up being compiled into our very own WW1 book! Some of the topics are very interesting, so I recommend you check it out.

Another part of the project that I felt was very important wasn’t actually a milestone, but it was a separate thing we were doing alongside our main milestones. It was our book chats, where we had to read a book about WW1 and then discuss it with group members every week. There were several different books, and the one I got to read was “Generals Die in Bed” by Charles Yale Harrison. The book is about a Canadian soldier sent to the front to fight in the trenches. It’s actually a pretty good book, so I won’t spoil it too much here, because I recommend that you check it out.

The reason that I think this part of the project was so important is because the book provided a perspective of the war from the position of someone actually fighting it in a filthy blasted trench. I feel like this book also provided a great example of our second main competency for this project, Take Historical Perspective. The Historical perspective competency is about overcoming your current concerns, beliefs, and values to understand those of people during WW1. This book was perfect for using the competency, because it provided a realistic perspective on someone who was in the war, which really helped me understand what it was like for those people. I also think the book also helped me get an answer for the driving question, because reading this book helped me understand how the war impacted the Canadians that went to fight. This is just one example, there were lots of other articles I read that helped me understand how the war changed Canada, and how it helped it become it’s own country.

So, in conclusion, I learned a lot more about WW1 then I knew previously, and just how much the war helped Canada onto the road of becoming independent. That’s about it for this blog post, see you next year!