Resources

BC Heritage Fairs Manual

Download a copy of our Manual.

Download a copy of Heritage Fairs and the BC Curriculum, a document that illustrates how Heritage Fairs contribute to the development of students’ historical thinking skills and build on the curriculum designed by the BC Ministry of Education.

In the Community

• Local Museums and Archives
• Senior Citizens in the Community
• Libraries
• Family Members
• Churches
• Community Centres

Online Resources

• Historica-Dominion Institute

  The Historica Foundation of Canada and The Dominion Institute merged to create the Historica-Dominion Institute. Although they are not sponsoring a National Fairs Program in 2010, they have many usable resources listed on their website. Such as:

  • Encounters With Canada

    Bringing thousands of high school students to the capital every year to expose them to our national institutions

  • The Memory Project

    Allowing 1,500 veterans to share their stories of service and sacrifice with almost one million young Canadians

  • The Canadian Encyclopedia

    The authoritative word on all things Canadian

  • Passages to Canada

    600 successful immigrants share their own story of becoming Canadian citizens

• Benchmarks of Historical Thinking

  The Benchmarks Project combines the research of historians and educators with the experience and skills of classroom teachers to create practical ways of encouraging promoting and assessing students’ historical thinking in classroom settings.

• Heritage For Kids

  Excellent resource as well as numerous links to even more heritage/history education sites.

• Social Studies Resources for Canadian Teacher

  Reliable and authoritative resources directly tied to your curricular needs.

• Provincial Capital Commission

  A collection of unit plans, video clips and radio vignettes to start your class discussion of BC.

• Portrait V2K

  The City of Vancouver Millennium Project

• BC Ministry of Education

• Project Topics and Ideas

Public Speaking Tips for Students

The following tips will help you when you are talking to the public.

• Be at ease! Your interview is your opportunity to tell audience what you learned by doing your project.
• Be interested! If you show that you are really interested in your project, most likely your audience will be interested, too!
• Be prepared! Prepare for your audience. Ask adults and other students to question you about your project. Write down the questions they ask and be prepared to answer those questions and others like them.
• Listen carefully to the questions usually your audience will ask you questions you can answer wait until the person has completed asking the question and think of your answer before talking.
• Answer truthfully If you are asked a question to which you do not know the answer, it is better to say you don’t know rather than fake it.
• Have fun! Interviews are interesting, good practice, and fun!

Some questions that you might be asked:

1. Why is it important for people to know about this topic? (Historical Significance)
2. How did you find out the information for your project? (Evidence)
3. If you could do this project differently, what changes would you make?