Hello blog readers,

Our final humanities unit is over. This year has been amazing and the amount of incredible things I’ve learned have been so cool but it’s time for summer. For this post I’m going to give you a full run though of this unit. 

Driving Question

We started this unit off by learning our driving question. Every single unit has it’s driving question. Power was what our theme was for this unit the driving question was “how does power alter relationships?” I really liked this question because I find power intriguing. Power is constantly all around us and we are always affected by it. Also, this question is very important to think about because it is a reoccurring thing in all of our lives.

Comic Book

For this unit we read a comic book. It’s more of a graphic novel but you get the point. The book was written by Chester Brown. It was a very good book and super easy to read. I was always interested in what would happen next and the style of writing is what I think caused that. This book was about the Metis people and Louis Riel. There were four parts to this book and for each part we would write a summary. Here are my summaries.

Summary 1 and Summary 2

Summary 3. This summary was supposed to be a creative style video.

Summary 4. This summary was a about the whole book and I mentioned my thoughts.

Métis

Now that you know about this book we read and the work we did for this book you might be wondering who the Metis are? The metis are people of mixed European and First Nations ancestry. They all lived in Canadian Northwest areas. Metis is an old french word meaning mixed and the metis had a mix of two bloods. These people were just living there life when the the English came over and started demanding the land that the Metis were living on. The land was called the red river Settlement and the English wanted to just come and take it from the metis but Louis Riel was there and decided to do something about it. 

Louis Riel

Louis Riel the controversial figure in the 1800s. Was he a hero or a villain? Did he do what was right for the metis? Was his death justified or unjustified? These are questions I thought about a lot while learning about him. Riel in my eyes was a great man, I think he did the right thing for the metis. He was the only English speaking metis and steeping up to the English was very brave of him. I think he was a hero and his death was unjustified but that’s just my thoughts.

Here is a video of Louis Riel for dinner.

https://youtu.be/CpFNgdIrz3A

Louis Riel heritage minute                              

CPR

The Canadian Pacific Railway. The CPR is the railway that connects Canada. I’ve already done a post talking all about CPR and Calgary where the last spike was driven. In class one day we did this activity called CPR jigsaw questions. We went around the class room with this sheet of questions we were supposed to awnser. At each table there was a piece of paper with information on it about the CPR, we read that papers and took the information to awnser the questions.

CPR Jigsaw Questions

Treaties 

One day in class we did this activity learning about treaties. We learned “what a treaty is?”, if you don’t know let me explain. A treaty is a agreement between two groups of people. Treaties have provided Canadian government with land for industrial development. They impacted society a lot and they help country’s have an alliance.

Gold Rush 

NOT DONE(Gold talk,Influx to BC,Caribou ,Interesting topic,Reflect)

Power Project 

Now that you know all that let’s start talking about the project. In the unit everything we had learned came back to the driving question about power. For this project we had to create a short 1-3 minute animated video showing power. The power needed to be transferred between people and could come from a person or a group of people. To start the project we had to chose a topic that was about Canadian history but it had to be pre WWI and more towards the west. 

Out of our options I chose kanakas immigration. I chose this topic because I really wanted to do a topic about immigration. After searching up the kanakas for a few days and doing some researching I found out that Captain James Cook brought them to Canada and was the leader. We had a weekend to research and learn about our topics but after that we jumped into story making. My story wasn’t that well done I gave all the information I need to but I would have liked to make it flow better. When we got to school after finishing the story’s we got into groups and gave each other some peer critique. I was in a group with Melanie and Tamara and we did very good on giving each other critique. It was also very helpful when they told me what to fix in my story for moving forward in my storyboard.

This is my showbie that day when we gave our peers critique.

Time for the storyboard. For this storyboard I didn’t make it super colourful and I didn’t draw very well. I made sure I had every scene I wanted to animate though. Storyboards help plan out the entire video so it was helpful to do. After everyone finished there storyboard they just started to animate but I decided to make a script. My script wasn’t that long and hard to make but it helped me so much. The whole time I relied on my script to help me though the animation. 

My storyboard

The animation took longer than expected and it was a hard process. There were many apps we could use like explain everything, keynote magic move, animation plus, and FlipaClip. I decided to use FlipaClip because I had never worked with it before. Animation takes a long time so everyday after school I would come home and do a bit of it. Time flies by when schools almost out, so before I knew it draft 1 and 2 were due.

Draft 1

Draft 2

After we got critique on draft 1 and 2 it was finally time for draft 3. Our final video. I worked all Sunday with my dad (because it was Father’s Day) and finished the video. 

Draft 3

All this hard work payed off though because on Monday when we all had our videos sone we watched them in class. Mine was not watched in class that day and it’s been two days but I think my video will be the last shown. This presentation in class made me want to put a lot of effort into my work so I can be proud of what my classmates are going to see. In some ways the viewing party was our launch from the launch cycle. 

This humanities term has been a good one. I found out it’s not hard to put effort you just got to be committed. I also have found a love for humanities that I will hold with me for years to come. Goodbye grade 9 humanities, hello grade 10.