Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. For the past few months we have been working hard on a new project. I actually really enjoyed this project because I think it had a good blend of history with art. I love that we got to choose our topics for our final product. In letting us have a little bit of freedom in what we wanted to learn about, it gave us the opportunity to be passionate about what we were learning about.
Driving question: How might we use graphic novels to understand Canada’s involvement in World War One
Answer: Throughout this project I feel like I learned so much about WWI and the causes and consequences of it. I really enjoyed that we got to use a graphic novel and the medium for sharing our knowledge. By writing a graphic novel, we had to make sure we understood our topic, while still producing high quality art with a story line.
The final product:
The final product for this project was a comic book (10-20 panels) about World War One (WWI). This was an individual project which meant that everyone in my class made their own comic. We combined all of the comics into one big one about the different battles in WWI and what happened. For my topic, I chose women and their role in the war, specifically nurses at the Second Battle of Ypres.
To start off this entire project, we researched. We researched the underlying issues of WWI. After we felt like we had a solidified understanding what started WWI, we were asked to reflect on our learning and write an opinionated piece on what we personally thought started WWI. We had to back it with evidence from our research as you would in any good opinion writing. I chose to focus on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
After we talked about the underlying issues of the war, we moved on to learning more about what actually happened. To do this, we read the graphic novel 1917 which you can check out here. I think that, seeing as this was a project about creating a graphic novel,q it was appropriate to read a graphic novel about the war that we were learning about. Before reading the comic, we filled out a worksheet about how to read a comic book and the different parts of a comic book. This was a really useful activity to me because I’m not as much as an avid comic reader as some others, so the new terms helped me create a comic that met the requirements.
Next we picked a topic and starting researching. Because of the last activity, we were introduced to different conflicts, battles, and issues that occurred in WWI. As I mentioned above, I picked women’s involvement in the war, specifically their help as nurses at the Second Battle of Ypres. There was so much to learn and so much knowledge to gain about my topic, so I started off with filling out the 5 W’s (who, what, where, when, and why). I feel like I demonstrated a sophisticated level of understanding. I put a lot of work and time into the research that went into the research for my 5 W’s. By doing this, I had a solid understanding of what my topic was. By having a solid understanding of my topic, I could write an accurate and detailed story spine which I would come back to many times and refer to in order to create my storyboard and ultimately my final graphic novel. You can check out my planning documents below ⬇️
Overall, I really enjoyed this project and had a lot of fun. I thoroughly researched my topic so that I understood what I was learning about which in the long run made everything about this project so much easier. I had a completed graphic novel that had accurate details, an intriguing story, and in the end, some pretty cool images.
Thanks for reading that short reflection on this past project in Humanities!
Best wishes,
-Dana