WWII

World War Two was the most destructive conflict in history. More than an estimated 80 million people died during the span of only 6 years.

Over the past couple of months since spring break our PLP 10 class has been learning about WWII. This new unit takes off from where we left off in the interwar years, where we learned about different issues Vancouver faced following the devastation of the First World War.

Sins of The City

This year, all of our units have been based around perspectives and this was definitely something that was a huge part during WWII. Throughout this blog post you will see how different countries contributed differently to the war as well as how countries might have viewed events similarly or differently.

This unit started off with a novel study where we were given the choice between a couple dif- ferent fictional WWII novels. The 3 books we could choose from were: All The Light We Cannot See, Unbroken and Code Name Verity. I chose All The Light We Cannot See as I had read this book when I was younger and wanted to read it again as it was such a good book. Once we finished the book, we each wrote a book review that summarized part of the novel but not giving anything away while also adding in your own opinion. If you want to read my book review and the process of writing this book review, click here.

While reading our WWII books, we started off by brainstorming some questions we wanted answered during this unit. Some of these questions included:
Why was Hitler and the Nazi army specifically targeting the Jewish population?
How were Italy and Japan persuaded to join forces with Germany?
What type of war strategies worked on Germany to allow them to advance? Why did these strategies work?
What were the roles of women during the war?
And many more questions…

Throughout this unit, we learned about many important events, dates and battles during the Second World War.

Some of the important events included:
The invasion of Poland on September 1st of 1939.
Dunkirk (Operation Dynamo) on May 26, 1940, which was a battle fought between the Allies and Germany in France. When it ended on June 4,1940 about 198,000 British and 140,000 French and Belgian troops were saved in the evacuation.
Italy joining the axis powers on June 11, 1940 in hope of being able to get more land and pow- er.
The Battle of Britain from July 10th to October 31st, 1940 included the bombing of British ports, the bombing continued on shipping and also on RAF airfields, then the blitz and night bombings where London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights.
We learned about other events including the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Operation Barbarossa, the Battle of the Midway and many more.

On top of this, we also completed a big unit project that was very different from some of the projects we have previously done, we created a website. As we wanted to show the different perspectives of WWII, we were put into groups to research different countries. This meant when we brought the entire website together we had multiple opinions and views on the war. To create our groups we filled out a google doc including our first, second and third choice for countries. I ended up getting my first choice, Germany which I was really happy about as Germany’s perspectives were very interesting during this time in history.

My group was the biggest group in the class which included Adam, Reid, Sam and me. During this project, I think we worked very well together bringing out each of our strengths to create great work that we were all proud of. Once we were put into our groups, we were given the basic outline of what our website had to include. The website had to include information about your country prior to the war, how your country got involved in the war, military technology, timeline of the war for your country, details of significant battles, soldier details and your country after the war.

The first step was the research stage of the project where we found a bunch of information on what was needed for the website and wrote it down in a google doc. My group did this well by splitting up evenly what we needed to do which made it more effective and efficient when it came to putting all this information into paragraphs.

 

Once we had all this information we started writing up paragraphs which we would put into our website. We made sure to break up these paragraphs so that there wasn’t just one huge block of text. For our website we used weebly.com which was an easy website creator to use on computers but not on our iPads. We had a lot of difficulty especially when multiple people were trying to update and edit their pages at the same time, When formatting everything on our website my group added in a lot of photos, a map, videos, our country’s anthem and much more to make the pages of our website interactive and interesting to look at.

Once we had finished our first draft of our website, we received critique and feedback from other groups on what we could improve on and change about our page. Most of the feedback we received were minor things and pretty easy to change. After editing and revising our website we were ready to present our website to Kathleen Barter. Mrs. Barter is from the District of North Vancouver. She came to our classroom to help fact check and give us feedback on our website. She was one of the people who helped implement and write the new curriculum so this was a big deal for our class. Each group prepared a short presentation of their website which was to be presented to Mrs. Barter. The feedback she gave us was very helpful including adding a paragraph to our main page about our country’s perspectives of the war as our website is called Perspectives of WWII. This is our website:

As this unit was for both Humanities and English; on top of learning about history for social studies we also learned about necessary skills needed for English. For our English part of this unit we learned about MLA citation and how to cite books, videos, and websites. This was a very helpful thing to learn in my opinion as I didn’t really know a whole lot about citing your sources and how to show where you found all your information. To practice these skills that we learned, we started off by writing a paragraph on the Battle of Britain and citing the source while also practicing our quote integration. We then went on to cite a video by writing a para- graph on the Fallen of WWII. This was a little different from a website but overall the same con- cept. Finally we learned how to cite a book which I thought was the easiest as the information doesn’t change where as a website can be updated everyday. To cite a book we wrote a short paragraph on The Hitler Youth and integrated in quotes as well. As a source to look back on how to cite different things we used Purdue Owl Writing Lab. This also helped us when citing the sources we used for our website. These are the paragraph I wrote to learn and practice how to cite sources:

Another important part of this unit was a podcast that we made to go on our website. We were so lucky to be given the opportunity to interview and listen to a German WWII veteran’s stories and experiences during this historic time. Helmut Lemke was part of the Hitler youth and a sol- dier during the Second World War. This experience of listening to his stories was unbelievable and was definitely my favourite class so far this year. After listening to all his stories we each got to take a part of the audio we recorded as a class and make an individual podcast. I decid- ed to use the audio about the Hitler youth as that was something that stood out to me from his story.
This is my first draft of my podcast:

Once we completed our first draft we then got feedback from one of our classmates. This was very helpful and allowed me to make slight changes to create a better final draft. For this draft I added in more of my voice throughout the story to break up the audio a little more as well as a conclusion to end off the podcast. Here is my final draft:

Throughout this unit I have learned so much about not only the perspective of Germany during the Second World War but so many different countries’ perspectives as well as the perspective from an actual veteran from WWII. This project has not only taught me new skills that I can use in everyday life and probably future jobs but it has taught me the importance of learning about what events happened in history and how we can use the mistakes made in the past to make sure they don’t happen again in the future.