One of my favourite things about my Socials classes is learning about wars. Some of the most interesting parts of wars, is knowing who was fighting who, and why. One example of this is World War II, which was fought during the years 1939-1945 by two main alliances, the Axis Powers and the Allied Powers. On the Axis side, Germany, Italy, and Japan fought hard to win back land that was lost in the First World War. On the opposing side, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China fought against the Axis Powers for the valuable land at stake.
My class has been discussing World War II for a few months now, and I have learned so much about the main battles that were fought and the perspectives of the countries fighting. The first assignment that my class had, was to read one of the many books about WWII so that we could learn about a perspective of war. The book that I chose was a fictional novel called Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein, which shows the war from the perspectives of two British women. After reading just the description of this book, I was completely hooked. My novel discussion group talked about the twists and turns of this book and how we felt while reading it. The format of this book was challenging to understand, but that allowed me to work on my deciphering and perception skills.
After reading our World War II novels, it was time to make a book review! This was very exciting for me because it gave me the chance to share my perspective of the book, which might be different from how other people perceived it. Of course, there were requirements for this assignment (like adding the authors name, quotes from the book, and citations), but that didn’t take away from the fun of this assignment. I worked very hard to produce a high quality book review that showed my perspective of the book while also meeting the requirements.
One of the more difficult parts of making the book review, was adding citations. This is something that we have been learning in English, but it was finally time to show our work in an assignment. I have learned to always use MLA format and to indent the second line of the citation. I also learned about in-text citations, so I used one in my book review to show where I got my quote from in the book.
An important part of doing a unit on perspectives of war, is knowing all perspectives before making a decision. Now that I had learned the perspectives of British women during the war, it was time to learn about the opposing side. My class was given the incredible opportunity of interviewing a German World War II veteran.
Helmut fought in World War II on Germany’s side when he was in his early twenties. As we listened to Helmut tell us stories of fighting, loosing, and surviving, we had a better understanding of what it was like for German soldiers during the war. While Helmut told us his stories and we asked our questions, we recorded everything so that we could do a project on this information afterwards.
The project that we were assigned was to make a 3-5 minute podcast about one section of his stories. For example, my podcast was about how WWII affected Helmut and what we can take away from his experiences. Although my podcast was barely 3 minutes, it included all of the most important parts of what he said, and how I felt when he said them. I am very proud of my final project because it met all of the requirements and included extra components (an intriguing title, brief description, and music in the background).
The final project that we did in my socials class was to make a website. Yes, an entire website all about World War II. My class was split up into research groups which would tackle each country that contributed to WWII. In my group, Izzy, Simon, and I worked on Italy’s perspective of the war.
The hardest part of this project was explaining what Italy contributed to battles because they were working with Germany who was a main focus during the war. Although that was difficult, learning about Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, was very interesting. Learning about how he came to power, what he did as a dictator, and how he fell from power were all very interesting to research.
After my class finished the first draft of our website, we went around the classroom giving feedback to different groups. This was very helpful because we needed different opinions about our work so that we could improve the website as a whole. My class also wanted to make sure that all of the facts were correct because we had a guest come in to check our website. We had to split up the work and present our website pages to our guest, Kathleen Barter.
After presenting to Kathleen, each group was given specific feedback that would help us improve our website. My group was told to add more to the section about Italy’s perspective during World War II, which we did right away.
Whew, that was a long unit! I learned so much about World War II through the many projects we did. I also learned a lot about citations, which is a very important skill that I will use in university. I really enjoyed the novel reading and review section of this unit, along with making the podcast about Helmut. These projects were interesting to me because I was able to incorporate my thoughts into the projects while also being informative and creative. If I could change one thing about how I did this unit, I would focus more on the perspective of Italy on the website instead of the statistics.
Bibliography:
“Cited Mla Format.” Template – Roberto.mattni.co, roberto.mattni.co/cited-mla-format/.
“Helmut Lemke – Veteran Stories – The Memory Project.” Home – The Memory Project, www.thememoryproject.com/stories/1462:helmut-lemke/.
“Forgotten Ally? China and the U.S. in World War II.” CNN, Cable News Network, 1 Sept. 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/08/31/asia/gallery/china-us-cooperation-ww2/index.html.
May 22, 2018 at 3:55 pm
This post is really well made. You used great grammar and advanced language which made your post flow very smoothly. This post is pretty text heavy though, and I would have liked to see more pictures that related back to your topics. You underline your topics very well and show a depth of understanding on your topics, well done!