Hi! This is a post about a humanities unit we just finished called This Changes Everything. In this post you will see an overview of the project and some steps we took along the way.

The LAUNCH!

To start this project off we all read the Boo Of The Lion. The Book Of The Lion by Michael Cadnum is about a boy and his life in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t my favourite book to read but I did find it a little interesting and I do recommend it. Each week we would all read a certain amount of pages and then do a work sheet with alternating roles and discuss on the Monday. These were called Meet And Chat Mondays. The three roles were Artful Artist, Creative Connector and Smart Summarizer. My favourite roll was Artful Artist as I really enjoy drawing and I got to share it with my table group. For Artful Artist I drew Miles falling off the boat. This part really touched me so I decided it would be a good idea to draw it. Here is that drawing!

The Letter!

My absolute favourite part of this project was the Letter! For this we were all given roles and we got to pretend we were in the middle. We wrote a letter to someone else in the Middle Ages and we got to create this whole story, it was so much fun. I was a peasant who lived in an abandoned barn, slept in a box and her best friend who lived and slept with her was a pet chicken named Hedwig. I wrote a letter to my cousin Lilith who was moved to a different area without choice. I was really smart and even though I was not aloud to go to school I would work as a gardener outside the school and listen in on the lessons. I knew how to read and write which most peasants in the Middle Ages did not.

Curricular Competencies!

Comprehend!

What literacy skills did I use to read, listen, and view texts that we studied for understanding? For this project we read a lot of texts and took notes about them. I am not the most amazing note taker so this was a little challenging for me but I do feel I have improved. I want to continue to improve on this and to do that I’m going to try and find key questions to answer while taking notes.

Continuity And Change!

How are lives and conditions alike over time, and how have they changed? For this our whole project did evolve a lot around continuity and change. I really enjoyed looking at things that have stayed the same or changed since the past and I feel I did very well with this. We did a partner presentation at the end and we really got to research and expand our knowledge on this.

Partner Research!

Closer to the end of this unit we got put into partners for partner research. We picked five things to research about and either look at the continuity or change in each one. We picked kids Clothing, food for lower class people, valuables, French and astronomy. We ended up only doing two in the end for the presentation. For the presentation we chose kids Clothing as an example of change and food for lower class people as an example of continuity. We made a big keynote about the examples and later presented it to the class. Before we presented we did a presentation conference with our teacher who then gave us some really helpful feed back. We also presented to another pair who helped us as well. When we presented I was a little nervous but was actually really fun in the end.

Keynote!

Throughout the whole project we kept notes on a keynote we got to add cool animations and images. We later handed it in at the end when it was full with really interesting information. It was a big milestone that we all worked hard on to complete. We watched a few videos and did some sketch notes.

Overall this was a really fun and interesting unit and project and I’m super excited for the next one!