Hello again, Dylan here as usual. Today, I’ll be talking about our latest project, Gold Digger.

This project focused on the Cariboo Gold rush and how it played an integral part of BC’s history. We also learned about the discovery of gold in California in 1849. We learned about the Fraser River gold rush and a bunch more stuff that I’ll either get to later or leave out to spare you from the boring details of said unmentioned topics.

The driving question of this project was “How did the discovery of gold shape our province and its people?”. We started the project by learning about the “gold fever” and how a lot of immigrants from all over the world came to California in search of gold when it was struck in 1849. We did research on the Royal British Columbia Museum’s website. When I woke up and saw that we would be researching at the Royal BC Museum the next day, I got really excited, because I love Victoria. Then, I remembered the internet exists, and realized that we’d probably just be researching on their website. Sadly, I was correct. Speaking of their website, the formatting is very very confusing. If any web developers who work for the RBC Museum read this blog post, please do something about this. Anyways, we watched a couple documentary videos and took notes from them, and with those notes, we created a timeline of the history of BC.

(Train drawing by me)

The rest of this project went by really fast. We learned about the Chilcotin War and then we brainstormed ideas for a story about the Gold Rush in BC.

”Criteria for the story:
You have created a story according to the three act structure

Does their story have all the required details?

Your story is historically accurate:
Does the story seem like it’s set in 19th century BC?

Your story includes the essential elements:
Is the plot interesting?

Have they presented an interesting character?
Is there conflict that interests you?

Have they built a story around one of the key themes:
-Confederation

-Migration patterns

-Conflicts among peoples

-Struggles against the geography”

We then had to create a character. We wrote down different groups that we would enjoy writing about. I said that I would like to write about either Canadians from other parts of Canada than BC, people of African-American heritage, and people from the USA who migrated to BC for the gold rush. I was assigned to write about people from other parts of Canada, and the fictitious Lawrence Milton was born. Here’s his “character card”:

Gold Rush character card template 2

From there, we made a story spine, and I went to work on a story. I then put the story into Craft, and turned it into a QR code that you can scan to read the story. It took me at least 7 hours of writing for this short story, so It would be really appreciated if you read it.

I really loved writing the story and I’d love if we did more projects about writing stories. It’s fun to be creative in this dreadful prison called school, it gives it a bit of character and fills that dark empty abyss in your soul that emerges whenever you walk through the front door. Jokes aside, I love doing projects that revolve around creativity, and it’s always really enjoyable when we do them.

Well that’s the end of this blog post. This project didn’t have many steps and we mainly focused on doing research and taking notes, which I enjoyed a lot more than I thought I would.

I really hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and I’ll see you again on the next one.

Bye!

-Dylan