Bonjour,
Welcome to another Humanities blog post! Our last unit was about Vikings and explorers, however I am only going to be reflecting on the explorers. We started by writing a story based off of an explorer, then created images to go with it and finally put it together in a travelogue.
First the story. It had to be MAXIMUM 200 words (however our teacher moved it up to 300 thankfully) and exactly follow the story of an explorer, except for minor details. I chose to base it off of Jacques Cartier’s second voyage to Canada. I started by doing more research on him and his voyages. After struggling through writer’s block (especially because I have never written historical fiction before), I had my first draft, but it was about 650 words. Eventually, I managed to get it down to under 400 words, without completely ruining it. In the future, I’m not really sure how I can improve on this, because it was basically impossible to turn even one voyage into a story with under 200 words, while still having some detail.
Next the images. Everyone had to create (no just taking an image and using it as is) 5-10 images to go along with their stories, with at least 3 different formats/types. I chose to have one image per section, plus one for the cover. I made a plan of my images and then started making them. Here are my images, what they show and how I made them:
Cover: Jacques Cartier - I used Procreate and some photos of Jacques Cartier as a reference.
I think I would improve on my final image, because though it went with the section and was nice, it could have contributed more to the story. Either than that, I was very happy with how my images turned out!
Finally the travelogue. For this, we used the app Book Creator to assemble our story and images into a short travelogue. Once I had chosen the layout and style it was pretty easy putting it all together. My final book is below.
Though I mainly focused on the explorer projects during this unit, we also learned a lot about European explorer’s motivations (gold, glory and god), their technologies and specific explorers. Overall, I really enjoyed learning and creating throughout this sector! Here is my travelogue:
That’s all!
Kaia out ♥︎