More Than Scissors and Tape Go Into Making a Poster

My group was assigned to focus on the evolution of the spinning wheel. We started the curating process by laying out the documents and assigning each person to research one or more documents.

My group's pride and joy

 By filling out the graphic organizer we knew what information to include in the captions under our sources. We typed up what we needed to put on the poster but the question of how to lay it out still stood. We wanted it to appear as a horizontal timeline, but what’s visually pleasing about a timeline? We decided to use one of our sources, a bar graph including the different years our other sources took place during, as a road map to our “timeline”. We would attach each source to the bar graph with a piece of string, making sure it attaches to the year it’s from. We had to mount all of our information on pieces of construction paper because what would a poster be without a few boarders here and there? Laying everything out, we came across a problem pretty quickly: there was no way we would fit all the information we needed to fit onto the poster. But wait! There was a way! We simply turned the poster paper vertically and everything had its own place. Seeing as that was the biggest problem my group faced, I think it’s fair to say we had a pretty good time with this project.

One of the other groups focused on the transportation during the Industrial Revolution. They had a map that showed the coal and metal production in relation to the canals that were all over Great Britain. All the canals were connected to the cities in some way because the cities were where most of the production took place. The next group was assigned sources about the pollution during this time. Seeing as the cities were where most of the factories were found, that was where most of the pollution was found too. The amount of pollution found in countries skyrocketed during the Industrial Revolution. The fourth group focused on child labor. The Industrial Revolution was the first time children, especially girls, were working in factories. This group displayed many images of the horrible working conditions and the exhausted looking children. The last group was assigned the topic of slavery during this time.

The line graph from the slave group's poster

 They had a great line graph showing that as the industrial revolution advanced, slaves were in higher demand. I must say, I was genuinely surprised by how much I learned from this project. Who knew that by our tenth year of schooling we’d be able to effectively glue what we’ve learned onto a poster so that the viewers of said poster could learn the same things?