Other really cool books for Anzac Day!

I got a bit of a surprise the other week when I pulled out all the books I have purchased over the last few years in my obsession for great resources for Anzac Day.  The other week I shared some books I had purchased this year, but I thought today would be a good day to share the books I've bought and used previously.

First up is a great book called Solder in the Yellow Socks by Janice Marriott about New Zealand's double Victoria Cross winner Charles Upham and his deeds during World War II.  I love this book, as it combines chapter and pictures, by illustrator Bruce Potter, to tell the story.  It is full of wonderful new interest words, and I have used it as a reading book with my class with lots of great learning.  Last time we even exchanged emails with the author to find out about how she wrote the book.

Grandad's Medals is written by Tracy Duncan and illustrated by Bruce Potter (who does beautiful illustrations).  A lovely, touching story about a young boy and his Grandad.  It talks about his relationship with Grandad and how Grandad marches on Anzac Day with his set of medals.  The young boy is noticing that there are fewer of his Grandad's mates marching this year.

Set on the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea in World War II, Photographs in the Mud by Dianne Wolfer has beautiful pictures.  This is a story of an Australian soldier and a Japanese soldier lying injured together sharing photos and memories of their families back home.  It may bring a tear to your eye.

The book, Wartime Memories, is in an old fashioned magazine style and has lots of tidbits about life during World War II in New Zealand and at the battlefields.

The Donkey Man, by Glyn Harper, is a great book to capture the children's attention about the contribution of animals in the battle field.  I have used this book with a reading group previously.  You can find out more by looking at the post I have published previously.

I've also used Nicolas Brasch's book Gallipoli Reckless Valour with a reading group.  It is well set out with wonderful photos, maps and copies of posters and advertising from World War I.

My Marine is written by Phyllis Johnston about when the US Marines came to her community during WWII when she was a child.  She became jealous of her sister going to the local dances with the Marines and wanted a Marine of her own.  We've just finished reading the book Black Boots and Buttonhooks as a shared novel by Phyllis about her mother, May, as a child, so my class was amazed to find the link that May was the mother in this story.

This book, A Day to Remember, goes back to the first Anzac rememberance ceremony after the Gallipoli campaign and how Anzac Day has been commemorated in the years since.  Jackie French has included parts of the ceremony such as the piece from the poem For the Fallen by Lawrence Binyon, which my students recognised as they read the book because we used it for Poem of the Week.  Mark Wilson's illustrations are poignant.

Animals have been an important part of battlefield events throughout history.  Only a Donkey demonstrates animals paying tribute to their peers on the battlefield.  Celeste Walters writes from the point of view of the animals.  Patricia Mullins creates wonderful illustrations. 

A little girl's father is away at war and she makes Anzac Biscuits for him.  Phil Cummings, the author of Anzac Biscuits, writes the experience of making the biscuits in tandem with the experience of being in the trenches.  The muted pictures by Owen Swan bring a gravity to the father's situation, but highlight the innocence of childhood.

Le Quesnoy - The story of the town New Zealand saved is also written by Glyn Harper.  It is beautifully illustrated and tells the tale of one of the final actions of WWI when New Zealand soldiers liberated the French town of Le Quesnoy from the German army.  Jenny Coopers simple, colourful pictures bring to life the experiences of the soldiers of both sides and the towns people.

This is the story written by Feana Tu'akoi of an Anzac Day through the eyes of young Tyson who doesn't understand why Mum and Poppa would want to celebrate anything as stupid as war at the Dawn Parade.  Lest We Forget brings to life the tandem extremes of why we remember:  the futility of war verses the honouring of sacrifice by brave (and scared) men.  Elspeth Alix Batt's haunting illustrations of the Dawn Service contrast with the warmness of the family home.

This is a great reference book for primary school students on the facts of Gallipoli.  The Anzacs at Gallipoli has lots of good photos in it, clear headings and little side bars of information.  Some of the photos are confronting, but are presented in an understated way.  It also sets out each of the major battles that happened during the campaign.

Anzac Day Parade by Glenda Kane and Lisa Allen is based on a veteran of Crete talking with a young boy about the aerial invasion of German para-troops and the battle that followed.  The language is colloquial and in short, haunting passages.  The illustrations are a mixture of the present time and the old veteran's memories.

Caesar the Anzac Dog by Patricia Stroud is beautifully illustrated by Bruce Potter.  It is a great picture book for older primary school students as there is a lot of text on each page, but can be shared with younger students over several days.  It tells the story of one of our more heroic animals who went to war and did his part to help the soldiers.

Philippa Werry wrote Anzac Day the New Zealand Story so that students could have a one stop book on what happened at Gallipoli, the Western Front, why we have Anzac Day and how we commemorate it in New Zealand.  It covers the people the places, cenotaph, where the idea of poppies come from, the origins of the word 'digger', relevant websites, things to do, paintings, poems, abstracts from diaries and letters, photos....

Written by David Hill (My Brother's War, Brave Company) and illustrated by Fifi Coston (I remember her doing arty crafty stuff on tv after school when I was a kid!), this gorgeous, touching book, The Red Poppy, also includes a CD with a song called Little Red Poppy by Rob Kennedy.  This story is about a young soldier, Jim, possibly his first time in the trenches, getting ready to go over the top in an attack.  He is wounded and ends up in a shell crater with a wounded German soldier, Karl, and they are found by Nipper the messenger dog. 

 

 

Don't forget about other great books such as The Bantam and the Soldier  and Lotte: the Gallipoli Nurse as well.  The My Story collection also has some brilliant novels for the independent readers of the older students.

Anzac Day Reading Unit - The Donkey Man

Every year I do an Anzac Day unit.  I consider that Anzac Day is one of two very important days in the history of New Zealand (the other being Waitangi Day) that forged this country.  Because I do this unit every year I need to keep it fresh for me and for the students I've had the year before.  In 2013 it wasn't really an issue as I was at a new school, but in the past I've focused exclusively on Gallipoli one year, the Western Front in France and Belgium the next, the home front another year, and then on World War II the next year.

In 2013 I decided for one reading group we would focus on this excellent picture book, The Donkey Man by Glyn Harper.

 

Glyn Harper is a history professor at Massey University, who specialises in war history.  He has written heaps of books about various wars and topics within, for both adults and children.  I really like this book because it is written from the point of view of a donkey at Gallipoli.  Children can relate to that concept to understand the place Gallipoli was.

My first session with the group was to use the front cover as a launch pad for some predicting.  I wanted my group to form a hypothesis each just using the cover.  First we talked about what a hypothesis is.  I supplied them with a black and white photocopy to make their hypotheses, which brought about some interesting responses.

 

The hypotheses the group came up with did not mention war.  In fact they thought it was going to be about a donkey on a farm!!  So then I had to show them the actual book cover.  When they saw the red cross on the bandage on the donkey's nose they had a better understanding.

 

So I gave them another go at the hypothesis (see the picture below) once they saw it in colour.  Then we talked about what a blurb on the back cover was. 

 

 

After discussing the blurb we then revisited our hypotheses to decide if they still stood up and then investigated where Gallipoli is.

 

 

I like to use maps, pictures, graphic organisers and other visual aids to give the children context as they read.  The above maps that I used were a world map (giving context to where New Zealand is in comparison to Gallipoli); a map that focuses on the general area around Turkey (give context to neighbouring countries, especially on the fact that Britain wanted access to the Black Sea so Russia had a warm water port close to Europe); a map of Turkey (to see how big Turkey is in comparison to the area being fought over); and finally the map of the Gallipoli Peninsula to see where the attacks actually happened.

  

As you can see from the above picture, I used De Bono's thinking hats to get the group thinking about how the cover of the book impacts your impression.  We learnt from starting with a black and white cover to going to a colour cover how your impression of the book changes.  So by using De Bono's yellow/benefits thinking hat we discussed how having the coloured cover was able to help with making a hypothesis more so than the black and white cover; the colour gives so much more detail.  Using the blurb also impacts on what you think about the story.

 

So before we have even started reading the text, there is a lot of discussion and prediction about the book.  We have used a lot of visual aides too, to enable an understanding of where the events in this book are taking place and why.

 

I did photo copy the book and glue the story into the group's modelling book.  I did this so we would be able to highlight aspects of text and to focus only on the pages that we were currently working on.  I really did not want my original text drawn all over!!  This also allowed me to ask questions pertaining to that particular piece of text. 

 

As you can see above, this first lot of text talked about some of the more serious adverse conditions the soldiers faced at Gallipoli apart from bullets - disease.  So I sent the kids off with the dictionary, i-pads and/or computers to do some research into what dysentery and enteritis is, and how someone gets diarrhoea.  This was a fairly hefty bit of research. 

 

You cansee that I use the modelling books to record the children's thoughts in a variety of ways.  Sometimes I have done some writing; sometimes they have done some writing independently on bits of paper and glued them in; and they also do some collaborative writing directly into the book.

 

 

I really wanted the group to understand what life was like in the trenches.  And luckily there was a news article on the Stuff website of recent research into the diet of the soldiers at Gallipoli, which Glyn Harper, the author of The Donkey Man, was party to.  So I interrupted our reading of The Donkey Man to read the article Diet did Anzacs no favours.  This brought in a lot of new language that we had to investigate as we read.  I then sent them off to find the key parts of the Gallipoli soldier's rations in picture form from the internet.  They had to print these out and glue them in the modelling book and label them.

 

 

 

We then looked at other aspects that made Gallipoli challenging to the soldiers, such as the landscape, dead bodies that couldn't be removed, where they slept, flies, lice, fleas, weather.....  I used maps from other books, such as Gallipoli Reckless Valour by Nicolas Brasch, and photos from my own trip to Gallipoli for the Anzac Day commemoration in 2001.  I had set up the wall display (see below) to also help.  It had further photos from my trip to Gallipoli as well as pictures and text from selected books on trench life.

 

 

You can also see that my display also has references to the battlefields of France and Belguim.  I've also included a photo of my great grandfather who fought at Passchendaele and statistics from World War 1 which I felt were relevant.

 

Then it was time for a bit of a recap of what we knew before delving into the role of the donkeys at Gallipoli.

 

 

This next piece of text enabled us to consider some things that were explicitly said in the text and some things that we had to make educated assumptions about.  A good way of bringing those inferential skills into the lesson.

 

 

Some prediction skills came into this part of the text.  This is the good reason for photocopying the book.  You can control how far into the text the students get, to prevent them from wrecking all those wonderful skills like prediction and making hypotheses that you want to teach them.

 

 

 

On this page I was focusing on two main things:

• using bullet points to list facts.
• using inference to come to a conclusion about something that is not fully explained in the text.

The inference also meant they had to use what they had learnt from other sources such as photographs, videos we had watched, other text sources as well as this book.

 

 

Here I introduced the story of Simpson Kirkpatrick, from the book Gallipoli: Reckless Valour and we also had the poster on the wall display.  The students went away and found out some additional information at Simpson and created their own fact file about this legendary person from Gallipoli.

 

 

On this page there was a fair bit of inference in answering the questions and also using knowledge gleaned from other sources (other texts, videos, pictures).  The children are having to draw conclusions of their own, because this text is not explicitly telling the reader why these things are happening.

 

 

Finally the book has a factual bio about Richard Henderson to tell us what happened to him after Gallipoli.  I also told the group about who the author was, what he also did apart from writing this book.  I asked them to write questions for Glyn Harper.

 

I wanted to email the questions to Glyn, but we just ran out of time due to interruptions.  Another group I was working with did send him questions in relation to the Stuff article about the rations, and he was able to help us out with some answers.  It is really valuable for the students to be able to communicate with the authors.

 

We also verbally went back to our initial hypotheses about the book and discussed how accurate or different they were from the book now we had read it.

 

This was a great book to read with an able group of readers.  I would have preferred we hadn't had so many interruptions so we got through the book quicker, but we did take the opportunity to bring in other sources to give context to the time and place and events that we were reading about and this enhanced the learning for the students.