Hello and welcome back to my blog. This recently completed project was one of my favourites this year. This project was all about World War 1, more specifically, Canadian involvement. The main learning device of this project was a graphic novel called World War One 1914-1918. I was excited about this because I love graphic novels and I think it was fun to learn about World War 1 in an alternative way. Our end goal of this project was to make a comic about a specific battle or time in World War 1.
Why Did We Learn About This?
World War 1 had a huge impact all over the world and war the biggest war the world had seen prior to 1914. It caused major destruction to economy, population, and land, on a global scale. World War 1 was called The War To End All Wars which would have been great if it was true. Such a huge conflict would obviously set the stage for more wars to come. It’s clear that no one truly learned their lesson from WW1. To truly understand the nature of the present geopolitical situation within Europe and beyond, we must study World War I’s influence on the world. What happened in 1914 still has effects on our world today and it’s important to learn about it.
Project Path
As always, we completed some Need To Knows, and learned about different WW1 causes. We completed this graphic organizer, then wrote a reflection about which cause we thought was most significant. I wrote about alliances, and how they triggered a domino effect of war declarations.
After, we learned about comic vocabulary, and read the first part of our comic. To reflect on what we read, we completed a 3-2-1.
To learn more about who was involved, we took a look at The Central Powers, The Allied Forces, and the Neutral countries.
After we finished reading the graphic novel, our final reflection was to write about short and long term consequences of WW1. The consequences I chose to write about were economic consequences as the long term, and Russian Revolutions as the short term.
Once the graphic novel was finished, it was time to start on the final product. We each chose from a list of topics to make a comic about. My top three choices were The Battle of Passchendaele, Women and the War, and The Battle of Vimy Ridge. I ended up getting assigned to my first topic, The Battle of Passchendaele. Passchendaele had a reputation of being one of the most deadly battles in WW1. There was lots of heavy rain that turned the battlefield into a pool of mud. Many soldiers ended up drowning in the mud and were never accounted for.
To start our comics, we completed a 5W’s chart, and a story spine.
Once that was done, we moved on to story boarding. We were meant to have a minimum of 12 panels and I ended up having 18. My comic told the story of a Canadian soldier named Jack Smith who was sent on a mission with his best friend Steve Roberts to help build wooden paths to make traversing the battlefield easier. The got there to help two other soldiers and got ambushed by 6 Germans. Steve and Mark died, then Canadian backup arrived. Jack and Fred got back safely but were very sad about Steve and Mark.
Once that was finished, I went on to make the final comic. Some of the drawings were traced, some I hand drew. If I were to reflect on the process and do it again, I think I’d take less time on the images and spend more time on the story.
Competencies
The competencies we studied in this project were:
- Create Effectively: Effectively incorporating technical and narrative writing within a comic panel
I think I used this competency well in my final comic. After studying the different ways comics use panels, speech, and space to communicate, I think I used those things well and they helped tell a story.
- Analyze Cause and Consequence: Analyze why events happen, and what are their impacts?
I think a good example of me utilizing this competency was in our third graphic novel reflection where we wrote about different consequences of the war. I was able to understand the reason for each thing happening and relate it to WW1 effectively.
How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in WWI?
Graphic novels helped me understand Canada’s involvement in WW1 in a few ways. In the graphic novel we read, although it wasn’t focused on Canada, it helped me understand different conflicts within the war, the purpose of the Allied Powers, and why Canada went to fight. To help understand the comic I drew, I learned a lot about Passchendaele, and Canada played a big role in winning that battle.
I really enjoyed this project, it’s been my favourite humanities project this year. Thank you for reading my blog post and come back soon for my Maker post!
Sincerely,
Me
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