Have you ever been hung? Me neither (well maybe you have and you’re a ghost?), but Louis Riel has.

Yeah well um anyways…

In our last Humanities project of the semester, we answered the driving question “How has the portrayal of Riel changed over time?” We all created multi-paragraph compositions. This project consisted of two parts, learning about Louis Riel and improving our writing skills. 

To improve our writing skills, we first worked on Frayer models, which are helpful for understanding words. We also described the 5 senses of some words (feel, taste, smell, hear, see). As well, we practiced elaborating by writing a few sentences about why voting is an important civic duty. Here are a few of my Frayer models.

 

On the history side, to launch the project, we first did a human timeline. Some people in the class held a piece of paper with a historical event on it and then we rearranged them into order from past to present. After that we started learning about the Red River Colony and made a timeline with some of the events that happened. Here is my timeline.

To learn about different portrayals of Louis Riel, we looked at 3 different statues of him.

The first one outside the Legislative Building of Manitoba was made by Marcien Lemay and Étienne Gaboury in 1973.  However the portrayal of him in this statue was too controversial and after about 20 years it was replaced by a different statue, made by Miguel Joyal. Finally a third statue by John Nugent sat near the provincial Legislative Building before being put into storage in an art gallery. We wrote down some observations about each statue on the board. Here is some of what my partner for this activity and I wrote. 

Another text that shows different portrayals of Louis Riel is Historica Canada’s Heritage Minute. After watching this video, everyone wrote individual paragraphs about how Louis Riel is portrayed in it. Here is my paragraph.

After all of this, we combined our history knowledge and writing skills and wrote three paragraphs to answer the driving question. Here is my final multi-paragraph composition.

In conclusion, I learned a lot about Louis Riel and the Métis and their changing portrayals over time. That’s all for this post!