Hello Blog readers, get ready because this post is a large one.

This units main question was “How do the stories of our history shape our identities today?” We learnt many things about our history and here are just a few. We learned about Upper and Lower Canada, French and English people, Lord Durham, John A. MacDonald, manifest destiny, Canada East and Canada West, residential schools, Chanie Wenjack, Viola Desmond, Wilder Penfield,  the Canadian Confederation, and how Canada became one.

Since the confederation and how Canada became one is the part of this unit that I really enjoyed I’m going to go in depth about it. Confederation happened in 1867. In class we did this activity where the teacher put us into groups and each group was a different province. I was in the group of Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia was a well organized and rich colony at that point in time so we needed to think deeply about joining Canada. Each group presented there proposal of what they want if they join. Then Ms.Maxwell made a big document and put it into iTunes U, saying what will happen and what you will get if your province joins Canada. My group would not benefit from joining so we did not join and we did not sign the paper. This activity was fun because of the debates we got to have in the class arguing about who has the best province and who should get the most seats in parliament.

Now let’s go back to the units question. I personally think the stories of our history shape our identities today by making us Canadian. Let’s image the Canadian confederation didn’t happen in 1867 or lots of colony’s decided that they won’t benefit from Canada and they would like to join Britain or France instead. Then we would not be able to celebrate Canada Day. In fact we would not have the privilege of living in Canada because Canada would not be a country. If Canada was not a country I would be living in Iran which I’d why I’m thankful for the Canadian Confederation.

Now comes the exciting part, the heritage minutes. Heritage minutes are a bunch of Canadian 60 second videos each showing a significant person or event in Canadian history made by Historica Canada.

Each day in class we would watch 1-3 heritage minutes and talk about them. It was like studying the heritage minutes to understand the techniques they used to tell their story. My favorite heritage minute is “burnt toast.”

Everyone in class was supposed to find their favorite heritage minute and make a Celtic script about it. Here is my script.

My favorite part of this post, the part I get to tell you about the project. For this project in groups of 4 we had to make a heritage minute. The video has to be about a Canadian story before confederation. My group members were Kai, Logan, and Luca and we had to focus on land and territory. I think our group worked fairly well together even though some group members were almost never free and had busy schedules, in the end we were able to make plans for times to work as a group.

We started this project by doing a lot of research. Then when we found out about the Oregon Boundary dispute our whole group instantly knew it would be a good story. Second thing we did was write our story out to see what the main ideas were. After that we started the script and then the storyboard. Before we got to start filming we got to call a very important person. We had a FaceTime call with Davida. Davida is someone who works with making heritage minutes. She is involved with the script editing. She told us a lot of important things about making a heritage minute and she talked to us about the process you have to go through to make a heritage minute and how it’s an amazing process. Soon after we started to film our first draft.

As you can clearly see this was a very rough draft. The shots were not as professional as it should have been. Women back than had almost no say so we shouldn’t have had Lauren and I sign the treaty. Some people were confused about the story line and if I was someone from another class I wouldn’t understand it as well. Then we got back to work for another draft.

This is draft three and lots of things have changed for the better. We re filmed some shots, changed the music, and added a filter for that old style that the video definitely needed. Then our teacher decided we should show are videos to the other non PLP grade 9’s. We showed all are heritage minutes to that class and they tried to give us some feedback. Although the feedback they gave did not really help us it was still good to have. After we showed our video to that class we were ready to send it to Davida and Historica Canada. Hopefully when they see our videos they can give us some feedback because that would be so cool.

Looking back on this project I think it went well although if I could go and redo this project I would pick a more dramatic story. The story we had really involved Canada and impacted many but there was no big war or plot twist to get people really into the video. This unit was a fun one and I learned a lot about Canadian history. Till next time I post I’ll be learning about the next unit.