Hello and welcome back to my blog! We have just finished our first project for grade 10 so far and the topic was the gold rush. The driving question for this project was “How did the discovery of gold shape our province and its people?”. I answered that question throughout the project in the steps we took to get to the final product. Before I get started heres how my final story turned out!

Following the Gold Trail Story

Keystone 1: 

We started off this project by learning roughly about what the gold rush was. We completed a few group activities and answered questions about curtain topics by using the sources given. Some of those topics being the Caribou Gold Rush, Early BC and the Fraser River Gold rush, and lastly the Chilcotin war. Learning about all those different events really helped me understand the different perspectives and aspects of the gold rush. One of my favourite pieces of work for one of the tasks we did was the timeline of BC becoming a province. I am really happy with how it turned out and it also helped contribute to my understanding of the events between 1843 and 1871.

All of those overall helped me prepare for keystone 1. Keystone 1 was a cause and consequence sheet along with a summary paragraph. I was able to use what I had already learned and understood from the previous activities to accomplish this task. I feel I could have put more time into the cause and consequence sheet as I didn’t fully fill it out. I feel like I did a good job on the summary but I could have still revised it to make it better. 

Keystone 2:

After learning everything we needed to know about the gold rush we were able to more onto keystone 2, character cards. Before completing this keystone we were given multiple different groups of people that we could choose to make our character card about. The two choices I really felt I could complete a great character card and later on story about were either the Californians or Women. I was given Californians, then I was ready to move onto the next steps. There were a few questions we needed to find information on before we could create the actual character card. We completed this work in an app called craft. Heres the work I completed on my topic. 

Character Card Research

I then was able to input that creativity to create my own character on my topic. I am really happy with how my character card turned out and I feel this keystone really helped enhance my overall story. Check out my finished character card down below ⬇️

Keystone 3: 

Lastly was keystone 3, the final story draft. Using all my previous work I was able to easily create a story with the information I learned throughout the project. I started by creating a rough draft of my story in the app pages. Then once I was finished I put my story into a book template which I feel made the appearance of my story look great. The next step was to get peer feedback on my story draft to get a different perspective on something I may have missed. We got into small groups and gave each other feedback on our story’s. I feel like this step really helped me realize some of the things I may have missed, which I then fixed before handing in my final draft. In the end I am really happy with how my overall story turned out. I feel like I put in a lot of work into making it the best that it could be.

Overall I am super happy with how this project turned out. I feel like I worked hard throughout all the assignments we got to do. I really enjoyed getting to write a story and I feel I could have wrote a lot more but I decided to keep it short and detailed throughout. I definitely think this project improved my story telling skills and I was also able to use my knowledge from previous projects like by using the story spine which helped me make my story even better. That’s all for this post and I hope you enjoyed reading what I learned!

Signing off,

Makenna