Quarter 3

The activity that I will be doing this reflection about is the project called "The Colonial Newspaper". In this project, we were required to create a newspaper that might have been sold during the time of the colonies in America. We were given choices of some events that took place during the Revolutionary War and we created newspaper articles about them. These articles were in the standard format where we had to mention where, what, who, when, why, and how the event took place. I chose to make newspaper articles on the Battle of Saratoga, the Treaty of Paris, and a man named John Hancock who had the biggest, most flamboyant signature on the treaty that ended the war.

In my opinion, the purpose of this project was to shed much more light on some of the events that took place during the revolutionary war and on what exactly happened. The project enabled us to go on the internet and search for ourselves what happened during the events that transpired and this helps us much more than actually having someone teach it to us. Since we were the ones conducting the research, we had a different version of a "hands-on" experience that gave us more information and this information was applied by us into a project.

While doing this project, I had learned most everything about the Battle of Saratoga and the Treaty of Paris. I now know that the Battle of Saratoga was one of the most major wars that occured during the Revolutionary war and it was a huge turning point for the war in the favor of the Colonists. After the big victory at Saratoga, New York, the war for the colonial lands simply fell into the hands of the Americans and they started to win most every battle after that until they finally won the battle that ended the Revolutionary War; the Battle of Yorktown. Once the Americans won that war, with great help from the French, Great Britian surrendered and they gave the Americans their independance and freedom.

If there was one thing that I could have changed or done differently about the whole project was to remember one page from the newspaper. While I was printing the newspaper, I had forgotten to print the page about John Hancock and so I handed it in with one of the pages missing. This slightly lowered my grade and so I would have liked to have remembered printing it so that I could have gotten better marks on the project.

My goal this year in social studies is to better understand the world's history. This project has helped me greatly in achieving my goal since I did much research on the history of America and the Revolutionary War.