Hello and welcome back to my blog. It’s been a minute since I’ve written a blog post so let’s catch up. I’ve recently completed my first humanities project of grade 10, which is what I’m writing about today. This project was a solo project, called Gold Digger. In these couple months of learning, we went over the British Columbia Gold Rush and how it shaped what we know as BC today. We talked about the impact of the settlers on Indigenous peoples of BC, how the settlers came here, different gold rushes in the province, and more. The end goal of this project was a to write a historically accurate short story about someone or a group of people in BC during the time of the gold rush.
To start this project, we had to learn everything we could about the Gold Rush. Using multiple resources such as documentaries and websites, we compiled a notes document with information about gold, historical figures and groups, migration, Indigenous impact, and more. Below, you can access my notes document.
After taking notes, we took a deeper dive into a few historical events of the making of BC, and how the gold rush and influx of immigrants led to confederation. This learning was done through our Keystones.
In the first Keystone, we dove back into an old topic that our PLP class knows all too well. PLP specially integrates different concepts into lots of projects through the years. One familiar one is Cause and Consequence. For this Keystone, we went over the causes and consequences of the Gold Rush and influx of immigrants in BC. The assignment was to write a paragraph to accompany a cause and consequence sheet. I chose the most important and relevant causes and consequences to add in. Here is the paragraph and sheet:
In Keystone 2, we began the process of writing our short story. For this assignment, we had to make a character card of our main character that included a bit about them, and two artifacts that we relevant to the story.
The area of focus for my story was women and their role in the gold rush and early BC. I wanted to keep my story historically accurate, or as much as I could, so I did some research into specific important women of the time. None of the women I looked into piqued my interest quite as much as a woman named Agnes McVee. Below are the notes I took on Agnes in our new note taking app called Craft.
Agnes, though her existence ins’t 100% proven, was a female serial killer during the Cariboo Gold Rush. I’m one of those true crime nerds that listen to a bunch of crime podcasts, so writing a story about a serial killer was pretty exciting. I haven’t done a whole ton of short story writing before and this was finally a topic I was actually interested in. Here is my character card of Agnes, the main character in my story.
In keystone 3, we learned more about story structure. Previously, we had done story spines and story mountains, but for this project, we used the three-act story structure. The story structure leads us through the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Here is what I wrote on my story structure.
We also completed a checklist of elements we had to include in our story.
Finally, we wrote our stories and did peer critique. I have to admit that I perhaps got too wrapped up in the murder theme and could’ve included more on the gold rush but accomplished is good enough for me. You can read my story below.
Our driving question for this project was:
How did the discovery of gold shape our province and its people?
The discovery of gold shaped our province in a few main ways. The first being that BC’s population is mostly made up of generations of immigrants starting in the gold rush. The second being that the gold rush was responsible for the creation of BC as a province and joining confederation. BC came to be due to the influx of immigrants in the Gold Rush.
I learned a lot in this project. Mostly about early BC and the gold rush, but I also had a valuable chance to develop my creative writing skills. More specifically, I learned about female involvement in the gold rush and all the different groups that came to BC and made it a province. Thanks for reading my blog post!
Sincerely,
Me
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