WW2 is a huge moment in the history of human race and will never be forgotten. It is something I have always found very interesting and recently in our humanities class we have had some amazing opportunities to learn about it. There were few different parts to this unit and our final project was something that none of us had ever done before so it was new for all of us. We also had a very interesting guest come in to talk to us about the war.

One of the first things we did in this unit was read a book that was about WW2. There were several choices of books and the one that I chose was called Unbroken. This was a very interesting true story about a WW2 soldier who was captured by japanese soldiers, survived on a raft for a month and was also an Olympian. This book gave us another way to look at the war from a soldiers perspective and to see what some of them had to go through. With this boom we also had to write a review about what we thought about the book. This was something that really made us reflect on what we had read in the book and allowed us to share with other people. We made the review into another blog post and added it to our ever growing collection. 

Another part of the unit that helped us understand a soldiers perspective was actually talking a WW2 veteran. His name was Helmut Lemke and he came into our class to talk to us about his experience in the war. Another part of this that was also very interesting was that he was a German WW2 soldier. We would think if him as the “bad guy” and he gave us the perspective of what he thought of the war. Of course there was an assignment with this as well and we had to make a podcast. We recorded our whole conversation with him and he had to get one part of it and focus on it. The part that I focused in was his thought on the war and how we could prevent it in the future. This really helps us understand different ways the soldiers thought about the war and some of things they went through. 

All of this eventually led up to our creation of the website. We were put into groups and separated into different countries that took place in WW2. My country was japan so we did all of our research on japan in the war. To prepare for the website we did several things. One of the things that we had to practice was citing the work that we would put int he website. This was something that we spent a lot of work on and something that we had to perfect for the website. In the website we had to create several different pages about different parts of the war. We had a main page, before the war page, during the war page and an after war the page. Each page has many sections and we had to present all of this to another guest that came into our class. Her name is Kathleen Barter and she is a historian that came in and took a look at our website. We presented our pages to her and answered any questions she had about them. 

Overall this unit, like the WW1 unit, was something that I had a lot of fun learning about. There were many battles that we talked about and many different perspectives of the war. Learning about different views on the war was very important and made learning about it much more fun. These units are some of my favourite to do in school and I really hope over the next couple of years there will be more like this.