So a few months ago in PLP (yes I’m just posting the blog post about it now…oops) we learned about World War II. During this we had a few different assignments to hand in which helped us with our learning. 

First, we had been taking notes and then rewriting them in different formats, so by the time we got to WWII I had what I found to be the hardest one yet, a concept map. Concept maps honestly confuse me more than help me, but thinking about it did make me understand the ideas at least a bit better, although I know I won’t be doing another concept map anytime soon. Also this isn’t really a concept map but I tried, okay?

This concept map ended up being the basis of what I was going to learn in the weeks to come. 

Leading up to World War II Europe was dealing with the issue of growing dictatorships. These dictators included Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. They caused fear in France and Britain through their increased power and how it looked to the citizens.

Our next assignment after the notes was to make a decision making model about what France and Britain’s options were in regards to growing dictatorships. We were forced to think about how they could solve this problem and keep their countries safe, and try to determine if there were other options than war. This activity was an interesting way to see that sometimes war is extremely hard to avoid and it’s hard to know what the best decisions is before taking action. 

Afterwards we learned a bit about Britain’s appeasement policy. They had a theory that if they followed along with everything Germany said they wouldn’t start any conflicts. We read a few documents which talked about this policy and the effect it had in Britain and afterwards decided if we thought it was the right policy for Britain at the time. It was extremely interesting because at first we read two anti-appeasement documents, then three documents which were pro appeasement, which ended up changing my mind about it. Hearing different biases I feel helps me make a more educated decision, although sometimes I will take on their bias.

So once we finished learning about why the war began we got to start learning about the actual events of the war. Everyone got into groups and was assigned a specific topic which we were to research and present to the class. Kirby and I got assigned the Phoney War which was a period where war had been declared nothing had really happened yet. Both sides were hesitant to be the first side to attack and kept holding off. For this we created a document to present to the class which you can see below. 

While all these events were being presented we had a document to fill out about the significance of each of these events. We were then tasked with deciding which was the most significant to history, and writing a paragraph about why. I chose the attack on Pearl Harbour, and you can read about why below.  

We ended up finishing the WWII unit in a really cool way. At the very beginning we had to write down stuff about we knew about the war, and what we thought of when we thought of it. We all figured Ms. Willemse totally forgot about until she brought it up way after we did it. We then wrote down ideas in the same categories and connected the differences between our initial and final thoughts. This was a great way to reflect on what we learned in this extensive unit.