Today, we will be talking about my favourite Humanities project from grade 9. This project was focused on Canada’s impact in WW1. We did research about a Canadian soldier of our choice, and we put together a book comprised of different events Canadians took part in.

I am going to break this post down into three major parts. Number 1 and 2 are focused on the competencies being assessed, and the last part will be about reflection.

Competency #1: Comprehend

This competency is all about figuring out what methods I used to understand the books, videos and pages, that we looked at while doing our research. For me, the books that we read were a little hard to understand. They introduced me to new words like abstained, munitions and lorry. Other than that, everything else was perfectly fine to understand.

I was able to understand the videos and assignment pages that we were given perfectly fine, but the books were introducing new words to me, meaning I had to re-read some sections a couple of times or look up terms in the dictionary to understand the full meaning. DID YOU HAVE TO LOOK UP PLACES ON A MAP?

Competency #2: Historical Perspective

During some of my groups discussions about WW1, I found myself jumping to the defence of the soldiers in WW1. I’ve never gotten this passionate about a topic before, and it was a new feeling to me. When someone bagged on a soldier by saying something like “but they murdered hundreds of people”, I really thought about the situation a soldier would’ve been in. We, as kids born in the 21st century, can’t truly comprehend what it was like in WW1. We could never understand how good, average men were thrown into battles, and forced to murder other average men all because a duke was shot in the head. To me, it makes no sense, but you don’t really have time to think about that when there are mortar shells flying above you’re head. So, my mindset about soldiers in WW1 has grown a lot over this project. It’s gone from thinking that soldiers are cold blooded killers (portrayed in some movies), to feeling sympathy for them and the horror they’ve witnessed.

This is the book that my class made together. I wrote the sections on Vimy Ridge and Sir Arthur Currie.

Reflection:

I am happy with how my final book pages came out. I wanted to mix things up a little bit and thats why I decided to include a fun facts section in the last page. It made a nice contrast to the paragraph writing. However, even though I am satisfiedwith the end product, there are some things that I would have done better, including doing more research on my soldier, remembering that there was going to be a citation page, keeping track of my citations from the start, and adding higher quality music to the sound bubbles.

In the overall project, I realized that I showed a good growth mindset. I came into this project having a bit of a negative outlook on soldiers, but I came out of this project with a lot more sympathy for and knowledge about soldiers. I showed good time management and only handed in one late piece of work. Along with that, I had an amazing time with this class. Not only was it a great Humanities ender, I found myself wanting to learn more after every class. And I thoroughly enjoyed the book that we read, which is very rare for me.

So, in conclusion, I came away from this project with a lot of new ideas, perspectives, and inspiration. Even though I am a tiny bit sad that I didn’t get the “WW1 tanks topic” I still found Vimy Ridge interesting and exciting as I had never actually known anything about it.