War to end all Wars Post

 Hello readers, and welcome back to my blog!

On this blog I write about my progress in school, and what I learn from every project.

Today’s post is about the recent project we’ve finished in humanities, “a War to end all Wars”. This project was all about World War One, which occurred from 1914-1918. The driving question in this project was: “How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in WW1?” We use them to learn, build ideas, and understand key topics of WW1. In this project we used a graphic novel called: “World War One”, by Alan Cowsill. We used this graphic novel to build ideas for our OWN graphic novel.

To demonstrate my learning, I’ll highlight the milestones/stepping stones that helped me answer the driving question best. 

First we had to understand cause and consequence, since it is one of the historical thinking concepts. To understand what it meant, we did a class activity. We wrote what we thought each term meant, then we shared out. 

We then started to read the graphic novel. I finished it pretty fast, since it was pretty short. I also found the storyline interesting as well. 

As a reflection for the first part of the book, we filled out a 3-2-1 chart:

 

 

 

 We then chose our comic topics. I chose “the battle of Vimy ridge”. I chose that as my topic because its one of the greatest Canadian moments ever, and I thought it would be cool to demonstrate. 

To develop an understanding of our topics, we filled out a “Five W’s chart”:

This chart gave us an idea of the people involved, specific dates, and why this battle began.

It really helped me in developing an understanding of my topic.

 

We also filled out a “story spine”. This spine was a bit of a rough outline for our comic.

Then, we started building the final product. For our final comic we had to have at least 10 panels, and have a splash panel and a open panel. We also had to have 2 characters in our story, (fictional or non-fictional). 

I then built my really rough storyboard:

 

As you can see, my drawing are really bad in this draft.. But I think I got my ideas out. 

I handed this in, and began my final comic.

 

For our final comic, we used “Comic Life”, a good app to create different comics. This app had templates to start you off, so it was pretty easy to get started. One thing I realized from this project is how long it took me to do my drawings. It took me an hour to draw my title page! Also, the story was another important aspect that was needed. 

After all those hours, I had completed my comic!

Classic

 

After submitting our comics, we did a peer critique activity. They said that my story was solid, I used accurate dates and times, and that my drawings were well traced. However, my drawings were a little inconsistent at times. 

I think I should’ve spent more time on my drawings and used my time better. But, I’m proud of my story.

In summation, I enjoyed learning about WW1, as I’m really interested in wars. Also, I liked making a comic, and using comic life. I learned lots about my topic (the battle of Vimy ridge), which is one of Canada’s greatest moments. I got familiar with more sketching softwares, such as Sketches Pro, and Keynote. In all, I learned lots about WW1, and I’m proud of my final comic!

Thanks for reading!

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