Holiday Traditions

Check out some interesting links:

Christmas through the decades: http://www.queensofvintage.com/christmas-through-the-decades/

Christmas through the decades (tv show):  http://www.history.ca/christmas-through-the-decades/video/full-episodes/the-60s/video.html?v=584782403949#christmas-through-the-decades/video/full-episodes

Christmas in the early 1900s: http://www.cardboardchristmas.com/papateds/Christmas1920s.html

1920s Christmas: http://www.cardboardchristmas.com/papateds/Christmas1920s.html

Kwanzaa Traditions: http://www.novareinna.com/festive/kwanzaa.html

Hanukkah Traditions: http://www.hanukkahcelebrations.com/traditions.html

Connections to Winter Solstice:  http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/december-solstice-customs.html

A guide to Festivus,  Holiday for the Rest Of Us: http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/festivus-complete-guide-seinfeld/


You get the idea... so, what are your holiday traditions?  Not everybody celebrates Christmas, but every family has some kind of traditions that are important to them at this time of year, often revolving around food.

Use the comment feature below to mention your favourite holiday tradition, celebration, meal, or activity.

Heritage Project feedback

What an amazing couple of weeks we've had experiencing presentations from SS10 students on their Heritage Inquiry they've been conducting off and on over the last few months.  I invite this group of students to leave a brief summary of what they did for the Heritage Connections project.  Use the comment button below to leave your feedback.

Great Start!

Hello SS10 students... I'm so impressed with the first four of you bravely presenting your Heritage projects on Friday. I am honoured to hear and receive your stories and research, and can't wait for the rest of your presentations. I've written some more about this at http://thielmann.blogspot.com/2011/12/awesome-start-to-student-heritage.html

Immigration stories

Today's lesson in class relates to the wave of Canadian immigration that came about as the result of Macdonald's National Policy and Laurier's Last Best West campaign. You are also researching many of your own family's immigration stories, and the stories of thousands of other immigration stories can be found online. Share one!  Don't copy and past a huge story... leave your own story, or leave a link and brief summary of one you found.

Heritage Project Check-in

Hailey's great-x?-grandfather,
ship surgeon on  Lord Nelson's
HMS Victory at Trafalgar

SS10 students have been working on heritage research, trying to connect up their own cultural and/or personal background to some of the major themes in history and even some important events, people, and places. In fact, they are finding that it is all important because, for better or worse, our past helps define who we are now and what Canada is all about. Thanks to Courtney, Hailey & Melanie (here), Hailey (here), and Bethany (here) for sharing stories of their research-in-progress. I look forward to hearing more (hint, hint) and really look forward to EVERYONE in the two classes presenting in a couple of weeks. I've asked you to fill out check-in slips in class, but feel free to let me know here, too, how it's going. As always, don't leave info online you are not comfortable sharing - be websafe.

Family History Research

Whether for a class Heritage project or for your own interest, you may want to investigate some of these "genealogy" sites:
Rootsweb engine http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi search existing family trees
Rootsweb http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/  research tools, free portion of ancestry.com
Canadian Letters and Images http://www.canadianletters.ca/ online archive of the Canadian war experience
Family Search https://www.familysearch.org/  free family history and genealogy records
Canada GenWeb http://www.canadagenweb.org/ check out the provincial pages, too
please let me know in a comment if you find other useful sites, I'll add them

SS11 class on CKPG

Some of you (SS11s) had a chance to talk to the TV camera towards the end of June... here's your piece on CKPG! http://ckpg.com/news/14925-canada-day-spirits-video.html. Great work!

Open Letter to my SS11 students

The Fading Echo...

Do you realize that you are the last of a generation? Fifty years from now you will be telling youngsters about life in the olden days, and they’ll be amazed that you were born in the 1900s. Some people call you the Echo or Boomerang Generation, the children of the postwar Baby Boom that changed the face of Canada, and for some of you the “Generation X” that followed. Others call you the Millennium Generation or Generation Y, the ones born at the twilight of the 20th Century. Take a look at the graph to see where you fit. Canadian Demographics - births per year 1921-2006 (source http://www.statcan.gc.ca:

Most of your parents and some of your grandparents were “Boomers” -- the big spike from 1946-1964. You are near the last part of the “echo” from about 1980-1999. So what? What’s interesting about the graph, about Canadian society, is that the generation before the war was not so big to begin with and is getting smaller all the time. These are your grandparents, your great-grandparents, and other people now in their 70s and older, people who lived through the Great Depression and World War Two. Almost all of the WWI vets have now passed (two are still alive as I write this, both 110 years old and living in the U.K.). Canada’s last WWI vet died in 2010. We have about 140,000 WWII vets still alive (less than half of 1% of our population). The youngest of these vets are about 83 yrs old. We have just a few years before there are just a handful of vets still with us. Of course, many other “pre-boomers” are with us, but they, too, will be less visible in the coming years. It is important that their stories are told, and that their unique perspectives on Canadian history in middle of the 1900s is preserved.

So, you are the last generation that will be born that can reach back past the “50 Year Gap” and ask questions of men and women who remember the Great Depression, World War Two, and the beginning of the Cold War. For many this was a rural life -- few had televisions, electricity, or automobiles -- Canada is now about 80% urbanized, but less than 50% in the 1930s, so chances are pretty good your great-grandparents grew up on a farm or in a small town. For many this was a time of restraint, conserving resources and fixing rather than replacing items that were broken. Those from beyond the 50 Year Gap know all about preserves and homemade bread, polishing shoes, and plucking birds. They’ll have stories of the war, of travel on ships, of hard work and strange accidents. They’ll have an opinion on Diefenbaker vs Pearson, on the building of the Berlin Wall but also its tearing down. Most importantly, their stories are personal and biased and expert and unusual all at once. When seen as a whole, their story is that of Canada itself, the foundations of modern society inherited by the Baby Boomers and those who followed, including you.

Rootsweb website

a bit of genealogy...

Try putting just the surname and a birth or death year of one of your oldest ancestors into the search fields at the ROOTSWEB website http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cg

keep trying a few options, just first and last name, etc. and see if you can find a matching result

thinking about heritage

SS10 students are embarking on their heritage projects... many of the current SS11 students have done this, maybe they have advice to offer (ask one!!). Think about the end product, a presentation to class that gives us a glimpse at the important things that "inform" your past. Namely:

1. a graphic representation (like a family tree, a picture-poster, a slideshow)

2. an interview with an elder (family or not) about their experiences in the past

3. share a story, life-lesson, heirloom, ethnic food, heritage skill, artistic performance, or symbolic object

Please be willing to pace it slow so we can ask questions and enjoy your inquiry." Looking for a starter on family research? Google genealogy, family tree, etc., or take a short cut to Rootsweb and plug in your oldest known relative as a starter. If you can't turn anything up after a few searches, move on, and start researching cultural background.

You could also try searching for specific places, histories, flags, maps, icons, images, landscapes, ideas, documents, foods, arts, etc. tied to the culture/s you are researching. Leave a comment here if you find a site worth sharing with the others that could help with the Heritage project.

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Heritage Projects

If you didn't get a chance to read my feedback on your projects.... do so here. Feel free to leave a comment, too.