“What has changed in terms of your perspective with First Nations people? What has led to this change?”
Throughout the course of this semester, I have learned about the many First Nations within British Columbia and their beliefs, ceremonies, stories, games, resource management, community roles, and much more. I’ve learned further about the Residential schools, how First Nations communities used to live before the settlers arrived, the relationships between First Nations people and traders during the Fur Trade, and the history of reserves and treaties. Through projects, assignments, journal entries, a novel study, guest speakers, and field trips, I have developed a much deeper understanding and perspective of both the history of First Peoples and how they currently live and operate in Canada. I’ve demonstrated multiple of the Core Competencies. Social Awareness and Responsibility is about working towards understanding the value of diversity and working with others to find solutions to benefit everyone in the community. Positive Personal and Cultural Identity is about building relationships with others and sharing your strengths and values. Personal Awareness and Responsibility is about understanding your own health, work habits, and how you fit into your community.
Some things I do to stay mentally and physically healthy include…
I believe in prioritizing health, as when you consistently take care of yourself, happiness and fulfilment will follow. I do many things to take care of my health, some activities include: exercise, reading, balance in the food I eat, spending time with friends and family, getting sleep and sunlight, and more. I also like to take lots of time away from technology, and to try and not do things that stress me out, such as these edublogs.
When I need to boost my mood or re-focus, I…
I know when I need to take breaks from working or when I need to rest. I also know when I need to take more time to do things that make me happy. When things get busy, I can step back and talk about things with my friends, play a game I like, take a relaxing bath, or get some sleep if I feel like I am needing some. By doing these things I can get back to doing what I need to do.
Some skills I have developed to make my creative activities better are…
A few things I enjoy doing are playing the piano, playing basketball, drawing/painting, and swimming. These are all things I have done for years, and practiced and developed my abilities in. I would love to further develop my skills at these things and continue to practice in the future.
For this assignment, Eunwoo, Hannah, and I created a board game called “Escape” based on the history of the Underground Railroad that we learned about in class. Our goal was to take the ideas from the travels of immigration to Canada in the 1800s, and use them to inspire a “snakes and ladders” type game that could be used for fun, but also as en educational tool/study guide. We tried to include as many historical elements and facts in our game as possible. We included these details in our background paper, trivia questions, game rules, and even in our illustrations on the physical board game itself. We really wanted the game to pay homage to the journeys travelled to Canada during the 1800s.
Core Competencies
“I can persevere over time to develop my ideas, and I expect setbacks and failure, but use that to develop my ideas.”
I had lots of ideas and suggestions for this project, since the first day of brainstorming. Some of which I developed and expanded on throughout the course of the project. However, some of which we ended up deciding not to use, which was ok. Although not all of my ideas made it into the final result, they were all a part of the process and they all helped to achieve our end product. An idea that we changed: I had the idea to have the railroads going both up and down, depending on where you landed. Instead, we ended up having them only go up, but we added police officers that could send you back to the start of the game. An idea that we kept: An idea that made it into the final game was my idea to have trivia questions included in the game. This was a way for us to incorporate more historical details, as well as a way to have people learning and studying while playing our game.
“I can show a sense of accomplishment and joy. I take pride in my work and myself.”
I felt very proud with how this project turned out; I think me and my group achieved our goals for this assignment. I am able to take pride in our work ethic, collaboration and communication skills, and our successfully working board game. We used our class time efficiently, contacted each other outside of class time with ideas and questions, took time to work on certain parts at home, and we were able to divide the work up really well. I did wrote the trivia questions, wrote the historical background, wrote some of the rules of the game, helped colour some of the characters, printed out the documents, and helped with fine lining and colouring the board. My partners did the drawings on the board, wrote out the trivia questions and coloured the cards, helped write some of the rules, coloured some of the characters, and we all helped choose the designs for the game as well as the kind of game we wanted to make. We were all constantly working on different things, and everybody participated heavily and consistently.
