It might be worthwhile to use a library like Flask which has less batteries included. This will force you to figure out which pieces of the puzzle you are missing and will (hopefully) allow you to learn a lot through exploration.

Once you understand what everything is doing, going back to Django, you should understand what all of the components are doing.

Django & Flask are not exactly one-to-one with the way they handle a lot of things, but I think it would still be a useful exercise.