It’s The End Of My World As I Know It…

Our humanities class has been one of the most diverse classes so far in this year. From advertising, to religion, to the middle ages, and now to the renaissance. Although the first two subjects are a bit random, we’ve moved from the middle ages to the renaissance, right along the timeline of history. This blog post is about our renaissance project that we just completed. Of course, it’s all about the renaissance and art, but with one little twist. It incorporates music?!?! Yup, we made a song, but before we get into that, let’s see the steps it took us to get there. Of course, no project comes without a driving question or competencies. The driving question was “Who or what has challenged your worldview in the transition from elementary to high school”. The competencies will be mentioned later in the post. Now, you might be thinking, “how does world view have to do with the renaissance?”. Well, this project was about a lot more than just the renaissance. It was about change, development and mainly worldview. We had to create a parody of the song by R.E.M called “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It”. This was a group project. My group members were Raymond and Annie.

Now, to the most important part of the project, the competencies. The first competency we were assessed on was “Create”. The second competency was “Cause and Consequence”. Create was “What literacy skills am I using to write, speak, and represent in the texts I create?”and Cause and Consequence was “Who or what influenced events to occur and what were the consequences of those events?” I showed proficiency the the create area by showing key parts of my world view, and incorporating them into my song, while efficiently working with other people. I showed my literacy skills by writing a viable script that showed my worldview and translated into real world terms. I showed proficiency in cause and consequence by creating an interactive keynote explaining consequence and displaying advanced knowledge events influenced renaissance artwork. I also made a mind map. It shows how my world view has changed from my transition from elementary to high school.

Obviously I will be talking about the milestones throughout this project, but first you have to understand that we focused mainly on the song, and worldview first, then later we learned more about the renaissance and how it affects worldview and how it influenced change. Our first milestone was creating a mind map, or brainstorming our world view in an app called Mind Node. In the mind-map, we had to show how our world view changed in the perspective of geography, time, beliefs, society, values, economy and knowledge. 

Milestone 2 was creating the actual song lyrics. As I mentioned previously, we were creating a parody or the song “It’s the end of the world as we know it” by REM. So we had to make our very own song lyrics based off our mind-node from milestone 1. Our lyrics showed our creativity on how we could make a fun spin off of the original song. I enjoyed this milestone.

Milestone 3 was creating the final individual song. This meant singing your lyrics, putting them over the instrumental track and putting everything together. Just like a real sound engineer. I didn’t really have a problem with this as I had created songs before and was familiar with the program we were using called garage band. I was a bit scared at first because my voice sounds really weird through a microphone but I had to persevere and finish the song anyways.

Milestone 4 was where we started to learn more about the renaissance. We learned how the renaissance was the first big change in times and how that reflects on the transition from elementary to high-school. This was a big eye opener for me as at first I didn’t know how the two were connected. For this milestone we had to chose a topic from the renaissance and write about the cause and consequence of it. I chose renaissance art. I talked about the piece call Bacchus and Ariadne as it looked interesting to me. I talked about how the consequence on the renaissance was humanism and how people started to look their own way and rely rely 100% on god.

Bacchus and Ariadne

Milestone 5 was when we got into groups and combined our lyrics to make them as good as possible. It was the final song which is shown below. Raymond, Annie and I combined our lyrics and sang the song together. Then we put it into a video showing our transition from grade 7 to grade 8 (pictures)

This project was a big eye opener for me as I didn’t really realize how much i’d changed from elementary to high-school. Up until this point, I more or less thought I had stayed the same person, but my world view has certainly been challenged and shifted through all our projects in PLP. Even looking back on our photos I’ve seen differences in my friend groups, my work habits and my behaviour. I enjoyed this project a lot and hope to re-visit it in grade 12 to see how much i’d grow as a learner and as a person.