Canada has been here for a long time, more than 150 years! It’s made up of 10 provinces and 3 territories. The story of Canada is full of  inspiring people who helped make it what it is today. One person in this story is Louis Riel. He fought for the rights of Métis people and helped create Manitoba. 

This is the main focus of PLP 9’s new project called “Let’s Get Riel!” This idea looks into the interesting story of Louis Riel, highlighting his important role in shaping the nation, as well as learning about how he has been portrayed over the years. Obviously at the centre of the project lies a driving question: “How has the portrayal of Riel changed over time?” The ultimate end goal was to craft a multi-paragraph response that dives into the ever changing perspectives on Riel, highlighting the dynamic shifts in how he has been portrayed over time.

First things first, we learnt who the Métis are, and what their story is. Within this first step of building our knowledge, we learnt all about the Red River Settlement, as well as some key players. Here is some evidence of my learning:

Timeline: 

                          Credit to Kaia for the timeline because I was away for that day.

 

The next step to help us build our knowledge was to see how Louis Riel was portrayed in various texts. In this step, we had a few investigations, the first one was all about Louis Riel Statues. For this investigation, we found out how statues can represent people in different ways, Louis riel has a few statues of him across Canada, and some people found offending and had to be taken down. The second investigation was a video by Heritage Minute, which is a series of 60-second short films, that are produced by Historical Canada. The video we watched was posted in 1991, where we wrote a paragraph on how the video portrayed him. This helped me get an understanding on how in that time frame he was portrayed specifically by the publishers. Here is my paragraph from the heritage minute video:

The final investigation was a video that was super interesting and I found it quite funny. Check it out here: Vimeo

The third step of building knowledge was how to become a pro writer. I personally find myself writing as if I am talking, so this was definitely a helpful step of the project. For investigation 1, we did something called “Frayer Layers” which is a graphic organizer that is used for vocabulary building and word analysis. Here is my Frayer model: 

A few other things we focussed on in this section was how to write a paragraph, this really helped me! I am quite a visual learner myself, so having things colour coded, and having a legend to follow helped me. A basic paragraph consists of 4 parts; topic sentence, the development, an example or two to help support the development, and finally the summary. This helped me for my Heritage Minute paragraph and my multi paragraph!

Ok.. that was a lot, but now we were at that stage where we knew so much more, more about Louis Riel, more about Canada’s history, more about the Métis, and more about how to write like a boss! We were ready to start putting all of our knowledge into a topic sentence! Although writing a singular topic sentence sounds easy, I personally found it quite challenging. So much information in one singular sentence. It took me a few drafts, but I eventually ended up with a pretty solid sentence: “Louis Riel’s portrayal has transformed significantly over the years, reflecting shifting perspectives on his role and impact on Métis rights and identity.”

Now that we have our start to our multi-paragraph response, I think we were finally ready to start writing it!! It did take a while to start getting the flow, but after a few drafts of paragraphs and squeezing everything in.. Voila- 3 paragraphs! I was pretty proud of my work, I made 3 easy to understand paragraphs about the driving question. It was quite the process, with plenty of revisions and drafts. Check out all my drafts and my final product here:

Here is a final look at my Multi-Paragraph Response:

What did I learn?

At the start of this project, I had no idea on who Louis Riel was, which is actually sad. He played a big role in shaping Manitoba, and is a big part of Canadian History.  Like I said earlier, I learnt the basics on writing paragraphs which actually helped me so much. I can use what I learnt in the future especially the writing tips and tricks!

Why did we learn this?

This was an important part of Canadian history, and since I live in Canada, it’s a good thing to know. Now I have a better understanding of the history of the place I live, and I learnt a lot more about the Métis too! It’s an incredibly important thing to understand the perspectives on individuals, like Louis, and to see how he was viewed from different perspectives of the Métis.

Overall I am proud of the work that I did in this project, I learnt a lot that I will bring with me into the future, and I feel like this was a fun important project and a great way to end the first semester!