Hello and welcome to yet another learning portfolio post. The only I will be telling you about today is one we were working on in humanities for the past 5 weeks. The driving question was: what was life like in the middle  ages and how does it compare to today? Let me tell you how I answered this question.

Book of the Lion

 To launch us into this project we were asked to read a book entitled The Book of the Lion.  But before we could read the book we had to make a plan to keep us on track. This plan included techniques we could use to make sure that we stay up to date with our reading. The reason we had to be so on top of our reading is because every Monday we did “Meet and Chat Mondays” . Meet and chat Mondays were times where we would get into our assigned group and discuss the portion of the book we had read in the past week. Every week we also had a task to complete to show our understanding of the reading. The role included Artful Artist, Summarizer and Connecter. My favourite role was the artist because I love drawing, I found the summarizer to be the hardest role for me because I read so fast that I struggle with reflecting on the chapters I had just read. It was also challenging because the vocabulary was different to what I’m used to which made it harder for me to understand. The connecter I found to be a cool job because who knew a 13 year old girl living in the 21st century could connect experiences with a man from the Middle Ages fighting in the crusades. The competencies being assed in these two part of the project is comprehend and identify continuity and change. The literary skills I used were listening to music while I read and scheduling time every day to just do it. To help me understand the book I highlighted every new name and documented who they were and I left notes at the end of every chapter recap what had happened. I also learned you could select a word you don’t know and look it up, in this book this was particularly helpful because there where a lot of words I have never heard before and it really helped me understand the book. We identified continuity and change In almost every part of this project but a time where we really reflected is when I connected my experiences to those of a knight in the Middle Ages.

A Letter from the Past

Next we were given a role in society, then we were asked to right a letter to whomever from the point of view of your character. I was a knight, I really wanted a knight because they can have such interesting stories. This part was very hard because I had so many ideas that it was hard for me to narrow it down to just one story line. The story I created was a very unlikely situation in the Middle Ages however it was good story. This competency was also comprehend. To write my letter I had to do a lot of research to make sure I had all my facts straight. And writing a letter from someone else point of view made me realize how different it was for women in the Middle Ages.

Presentation

Next we had to research subjects we were interested in and how they have changed or stayed the same from now to the middle ages. The subjects I picked were star constellations, painting and ballet. For this part of the the project we were put into groups of two. I was in a group with Cam, he did combat and wars and battle. With this research we were asked to pick one example of continuity and one example of change to present to the class. I picked star constellations as an example of continuity and Cam picked combat as an example of change. Before we presented we practiced with our peers. Simon gave me some good feedback that helped me improve it. He told me slipping up the intro would be a good idea, he told me the phrase t at the very beginning should be phrased differently and that it was kind of confusing and that I said a good amount of information in the right time.When the presentation time came around I was very confident with what I was saying and how my keynote helped show evidence of what I was talking about. I actually love presenting and I really enjoyed this project. Best of all, I learned a lot. Doing presentations make me retain the most information.

During this project we were also learning cool stuff everyday! My favourite subject was the Black Death. We learned about everything from court systems to trade in towns. It really show how much more logic we use in our everyday life. We use science to make sense of the world, we can speak for ourselves and have rights. However not everything has changed. Right now for example there’s an incurable virus going around and the whole world is freaking out. So even though time has gone by and people have gotten smarter we are still human.

See you in the end of the world!