Hi everyone and welcome back to our final humanities post of grade 9. Man it has been a wild ride, and I think I might even miss it, but not too much. Now this project we just finished was a crazy project, all about World War I. I believe Ms. Maxwells done this project before, but I don’t think she’s ever done it during a global pandemic. Our driving question for this project was “How can exploring stories and text help us understand the impact of World War I on Canada’s identity?”. It was a tough question, so our response, make an entire book. That was the final product for this project, we had to create 4 to 6 pages on the World War I topic of your choice and a Canadian soldier of your choice. This was a project we did it all by ourselves, but the book has all of our work inside. So without further ado, let me tell you bout my work!

One of the major milestones that I think that helped me up in this project was milestone 3, topic research. I think the reason I found this milestone so helpful was because it’s where I gained a ton of information. Everything I learned about my topic, Chemical Warfare in World War I, was from this milestone. I read tons of sources and watched several videos, to get all the information for my pages. The other reason I liked this mile stone it was because it was a prime example of the comprehend competency. The comprehend competency is all about The literacy skills do you use to interpret and understand the texts you look at. And for me I used a lot of those literacy skills while interpreting the texts I was using for research. Some of the skills I used was note taking, clicking additional research links, and searching any different words may not know, so I can understand what’s going on. All of these literacy skills help me to understand better what I’m reading. Sometimes I’ll have a general understanding of what’s going on, but using these literacy skills allows me to gain deeper and more specific insight into the texts I read.

The 2nd mile stone that really helped me was be Novel Study and the book chats. The reason I found these book chats so useful was because they were a prime example of the competency historical perspective. Historical perspective is about looking past your current beliefs and values in order to see the perspectives of those opinions the past, which was for us, the people of WW1. And for me these books were crucial to seeing that perspective. The way the author painted the picture allowed me insight into what was happening during that time. It also allowed me to experience some of the emotions that people were going through then, and showed me just how scary it was. Reading the book allowed me to leave my thoughts, beliefs, and values behind and see through the eyes of someone during WW1. It also really helped me answer the driving question “How can exploring stories and text help us understand the impact of World War I on Canada’s identity?”, because this book showed me how it impacted people’s identity back then, maturing, seeing themselves differently, and core discoveries about themselves that they never would have seen without war. So for me that helped me realize how it could have impacted Canada’s identity as a nation, almost exactly like theirs. Wether it be Canada discovering it could be its own country, proving its ability to fight, and discovering it was much more then an extension of Britain. That’s why I loved the help the book gave me, and I’d say the book was my favourite that we read this year!

Well guys we’re approaching the finish line but I still (surprisingly) have more to say. What I wanted to say was I’m super proud of how my final product turned out! It is the perfect example of my development in writing throughout the year. If you didn’t know, my big goal for this year was to improve my writing, as it’s not a talent of mine. But in this project I got a opportunity to try a new style of writing, factual style, with lots of information and a concise style. It was really helpful to get practice writing in this style, and it worked out pretty well. Overall I really enjoyed this project. I enjoyed the book we got to make missing different book creation and research skills, and most of all the content. I’ve always liked to learn history but I found World War I to be incredibly fascinating to learn about. It always astounds me that it happened in such recent history, and I’m curious to learn as much about it as possible. I’ve always been taught that the best way to move forward is to learn from our mistakes and not repeat them, and that’s why history is so important. I also thought that the subject of chemical warfare was super interesting, because it was never really discussed in the WW1 lessons we had. I think that learning history and connecting to it is one of the best ways to move forward and grow, and this project was a place where we got to do the learning part of it. Well I just want to say thank you for a great year in humanities people who read this post, but I’m ready for summer!

See ya in September,

Holly