For the final unit in Humanities this year we learned about New France and we read Shakespeare’s The Tempest. After we learned about both of them we combineded the two to create our own tableau.
Each group was given one act of The Tempest, we were given act two. My group for the project was Nik, Taylor, Lucy and me.
Throughout the unit we read The Tempest and after we finished each act we watched the movie version and the play version of it. We also looked at who Shakespeare was, like when he was born (April 27th is when his birthday is celebrated. April 27 was actually the day of his baptism so nobody actually knows when he was born.)
For this unit we were also learning about New France so one of the first things we looked at was what colonialism. For this we read a little comic about it:
As we learned, the European nations were trying to find a route to the riches of the Far East when they discovered North and South America instead. We learned that as they began to exploit the land for its resources, they started to develop permanent settlements to protect their claims over the land even though the people already living there had their own claims. In Canada, the European colonization began in what is now called Québec with a settlement called New France.
Then we looked at the different levels of society in New France:
New France was governed by a group of three officials known as the Sovereign Council. The Sovereign Council carried out orders form the king in the colony.
The second level of society in New France consisted of the clergy and the seigneurs.
The third level of society in New France consisted of the habitants, filles du roi, and the coureurs de bois.
The next thing we looked at was the rivalry between the two main fur trading companies the Hudsons Bay Company and the North West Company. We learned about the rivalry between them, where they were located and what happened to them.
After we had learned everything we had to apply it to our tableau.
For our act which was act two we had to set it in the development of New France.
Here are some of the sketch’s of our ideas:
Here is the the pyramid of the characters in our act:
Here is the final product: