Creating excitement about learning for Anzac Day

The other week I put up a new display about Anzac Day. It's a pretty tame one considering all the possible things I could put up. But the main idea is to get the kids thinking and it gives them some independent activities to do.

 

 

The following Monday a couple of really cool buzz things happened for me.  One girl had been looking through the local newspapers at the weekend, and when she arrived at school she came over and said, "Look what I found out about Anzac Day in the newspapers!"

 

I loved the fact that she had cut these  articles out of the local papers off her own bat and brought them into school. So I immediately gave her the pins and asked her to add them to the display.

 

 

 

Later the same day, another girl came to me after silent reading. She had one of the books from my Anzac collection she had been reading during SSR.  "Look Miss D.  That's from the poem we had last week."

 

She found it in Jackie French's book A Day to Remember - The Story of Anzac Day.

 

 

 

Each week we have a poem of the week and in the first week of this term we did For the Fallen by Robert Laurence Binyon.

 

This is a pretty full on poem to give to students aged 7, but my current class caters for Years 3-8 in a small two class rural school.  Not only do I have to cater for the younger children in my class, but I need to challenge the more able and older children as well.  So each week there is a different sort of poem, often with a theme I want to explore.

With this poem we looked at the imagery in the poem, new vocabulary, the variety of punctuation, and blends - a new aspect each day.  We also found out a little bit about who Robert Lawrence Binyon was.

 

Since then, other children have also read this book and recognised the extract from Binyon's poem as well.  It is all about planting that seed and seeing what takes root.

 

So what else have I got going on in this display?

 

This is a great poster I got from the Scholastic Book Club a few years ago (why don't they come like they used to anymore?).  This is a great poster to get the kids thinking about the symbols and rituals of Anzac Day.

                    

 

I got these words that are in the Vocabulary Expander out of the book Gallipoli Reckless Valour a few years ago.  The point of the Vocabulary Expander is to introduce and extend the vocabulary of the topic to the students and help them create meaning of these words.  The students each choose a word and bags it by writing their name on the back with a dry erase pen.  It the top box they write the word as a title.  On the next lines they record the definition that best fits the context.  They must start with a dictionary first, then if they can not find it, they can Google the definition.  The next set of lines is when they write a sentence of their own using the word.  In the bottom box they draw a picture to illustrate the sentence they wrote, demonstrating the context of the word as well.  This is an independent reading time activity and can also be worked on during topic time.

This set of statistics is a good way to get the students thinking about and discussing the impact of the First World War on a small, young country like New Zealand.

It gets them thinking about women and how they contributed to the war effort.  It makes them think about the contribution of Maori and the people of the Pacific to the New Zealand Armed Forces.  It brings to their attention the fact that there was something called a conscientious objector.

These statistics also brings death and the stark reality of war into focus when you look at how many soldiers did not come back out of the103,000 who served overseas, as well as the ones who came back wounded in some way or another.

And is it not amazing to know that there are approximately 500 civic memorials in New Zealand commemorating these men?

These are for the older students in my class.  I created these a couple of years ago for independent inquiry on a range of aspects of New Zealand's participation in war.  The students choose which one they will do.  Each one has web links and different activities to complete based on De Bono's Thinking Hats or Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. 

The topics I have put out for the small group of students to do this year include:

• Conscientious Objectors
• Le Quesnoy and New Zealand
• Helping the Wounded
• WWI Memorials
• Medals
• Mascots for WW1 & WWII

The tasks may require them to create something on the computer, do a poster, or record the facts in their books. 

One of the first books I read my class this term was The Anzac Puppy  by Peter Millett and illustrated by Trish Bowles.  I blogged about this book during the term break after I bought a fresh collection of stories to share with the class.  Peter Millett somehow really quickly saw my blog and responded to it, saying he'd love to discuss the book with the class.  My class brainstormed questions for Peter (see below) and we're set up to do a Skype session with Peter this week.

 

 



In my opinion I can not set up an Anzac Day display without the immortal words of Ataturk, the Turkish commander at Gallipoli and later leader of Turkey:

And it is also good to get some other background on some important Gallipoli knowledge and Anzac traditions:

Finally, I was away the other day and the reliever read the class Ceasar the Anzac Dog by Patricia Stroud and illustrated by Bruce Potter.

 And he drew this for the kids on the board, so I photographed it, printed it and added it to the display:

 

 

 

I love how everyone who enters my class brings yet another little bit extra to what we are learning and carries on the inspiration.

Newsboard... or Current Events

Many moons ago I went to a literacy course run by Jill Eggleton.  One of the many things she showed us to improve literacy in our class was the Newsboard, aka, Current Events. 

And this is not the old fashioned getting the kids to bring in a newspaper cutting - although that does have it's place. 

No, this Newsboard not only endeavours to widen children's minds of what is happening in the world, but to develop thinking, visual and oral language skills, as well as cover many specific teaching points of writing and reading literacy.  I also find that the Newsboard gets the children initiating conversations at home on the topics we cover and taking greater interest in the 6 o'clock news or the newspapers that come into their homes.  Ever since I have always used this in my class.

I use this for the following reasons to improve literacy:

Current Events awareness it is important for the children to become aware that there is more to the world than their family and their school.  Through Current Events they can learn about important people in their community, country and the world.  In the example illustrated to the right, I took this opportunity to discuss the passing of one of New Zealand's fore most artist and the kind of art he was involved in.  I normally only reserve colour pictures for really important events, but you can not look at art in black and white... hence the colour.

 

It is a great way to introduce the children to new vocabulary.  You are teaching them to read new words and the meanings of them.  It is also a great way to reinforce dictionary skills.  Really important stuff like using guide words, identifying which definition (if there is more than one) applies to the sentence, root words, prefixes, suffixes.....

 

 

 

As you can see here I have looked at prefixes (pink) and the differences between English English and American English, as well as the meanings of some new vocabulary.

  

 

 My focus on this page was looking at why we can use capital letters - in this case for the names of Awards, authors/names and book titles.  We were also reading as a read-to book My Brother's War so it was quite timely that these awards came out.  By the way I do recommend My Brother's War.  It is set during WWI and tells the story of two brothers, one who volunteered and one who was a conscientious objector, and their expriences of WWI.  I read it to my class of 8-13 year old children (Years 4-8).  One of the great things about this book is how it uses letters and switches between the two brothers stories.  One of the girls in my class even asked her mum to buy her the book so she could read it for herself and another is now reading my copy in her down time.

 

 

In the above example, not only have I looked at new vocabulary, but I have also looked at how brackets can be used to give more information.

 

 

The Newsbook is a great way to model using thinking tools.  Above you can see how I have used Tony Ryan's Thinkers Keys, in particular the "What if?" key to get the children thinking about what they would save first if their home caught on fire, due to government Minister Paula Bennett saving her cabinet papers when her house caught on fire.

 

 

In this example you can see I am using De Bono's Thinking Hats and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences to generate the childrens' thinking.  In this case we looked at the benefits (yellow hat) of having running water in public loos and explored all the names we could think of for a toilet.

 

 

In this example I've used De Bono's Thinking Hats again.  I choose this topic for the day as we allow scooters and skateboards at our school, but don't enforce the use of helmets or other protective gear.  We used our judgement (black) hat to say whether or not we should used helmets and protective gear at school and then the children justified the benefits (yellow hat) of having said gear at school or not.  Afterwards we rang my mother who is the Trauma Nurse Co-ordinator at Waikato Hospital to find out what sort of injuries we could get from scooter crashes.  You will note that we all looked at how we use letters to shorten the names of things, i.e. ACC for Accident Compensation Corporation.  By the way, the kids did not come around to my way of thinking for wearing protective gear at school.

 

 

As you can see in this example I introduced the idea of Blooms Taxonomy into our thinking about the very contentious topic of Ask.FM.  Ask.FM has been in the media a lot over the last few months due to worries by young people, parents, educators and internet guardians over the way this social media can be used to bully.  My class (hopefully) are too young to be interested in this social media, but I wanted to introduce it to them like this to reinforce some notions on cyber safety and to hopefully get them to start a conversation at home.  In the example above you can see I have used the skills analyse, evaluate and understand from Blooms Taxonomy to get the children thinking about the implications of bullying and social media together.

 

 

Where in the world are we?  Where is that place they're talking about - is it in the South Island?  Why do American's think New Zealand is part of Australia and that kangaroos live here?  One of the visual literacy skills I think is really important for children to learn is how to read a map.  I personally love maps, and I think that was instilled in me by the teacher I had from Standard 2-4 (years 4-6).  The example above was from when our Prime Minister John Key went to visit the leaders of several Central and South American countries.  I wanted my class to see and understand where those places were.  There are a few simple map reading skills I think are important:

• find New Zealand on a world map.
• find key places in New Zealand on a New Zealand map, e.g. important cities (Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin...), identify the main islands (North, South and Stewart), identify major water ways (Pacific Ocean, Tasman Sea, Cooks Strait, Waikato River, Lake Taupo...), find our significant mountains (Mt Ruapehu, Mt Cook...).
• know where the place they come from is.
• be able to know where some key countries in the world are that are important to New Zealand, e.g. Australia, USA, Canada, Japan, China, UK, France, South Africa and Argentina (after all the All Blacks play those last three countries fairly regularly).
• know how to identify the capital city of a country.

 

Consequently maps of New Zealand, the world and specific parts of the world will feature to help give my students context of the event that has happened.  This example above was quite fun, figuring out how a Chihuahua got from Avondale to Whangarei on her own (De Bono's red hat - using our intuitions) combined with identifying where Auckland and Whangarei are (map reading).

 

 

And another combination of map reading skills and De Bono's black thinking hat to make judgements on how a life threatening situation was handled so poorly by a health worker.

 

 

One very fun part of visual literacy is cartoons.  I love bringing cartoons into the situations and discussing the humour behind them, how the cartoonist has enhanced specific physical features of individuals involved to give them character, how different objects in the cartoon can be used to illustrate or symbolise other ideas, and how pictures can symbolise some classic language features - such as the foot in mouth in the top cartoon above and the scraping the bottom of the barrel in the bottom cartoon.

 

 

And one of the greatest mysteries to us in the weather.  In New Zealand we are obsessed with the weather.  When's it going to rain?  When will this rain stop?  Why is it so cold?  Why is it so windy?  So being able to understand weather symbols and the weather maps are another important visual literacy skill.

The Olympics - London 2012 - Our Learning.

The Olympics are great for learning so many things.  So we did.

First of all I focused on the ancient Olympics.

As you can see I have used De Bono's Thinking Hats, Gardners Multiple Intelligences and Tony Ryan's Thinking Keys to set this up.

I found some great reading material about the ancient Olympic games and how the modern games started, which was the basis of my reading programme and the Verbal Linguistic section during the unit, from the net, mostly UK sites.  This part of the topic I drove.  However, the children decided which order the rest went in.  The organised children worked efficiently and moved on.  Those who fluff required me to constantly remind them what to do.

The organised ones then moved on to this activity focused on the symbols of the modern Olympics:

Again I have used the three thinking tools used in the previous sheet.  This piece of the topic mostly focused on using a dictionary to find out what a motto, symbol, oath and mascot are; how the Olympics use them; how they apply to our school or families or sports teams.   I also had reading material to support this in my reading programme and lots of maths problems based around the Olympics using add/sub, mult/div, time and co-ordinates.

My organised children wizzed through these.  Some of my fluffers required external motivation.  A lot.  So then my organised children needed to move onto the 'now' of the Olympics.  So this is what they did:

Again, my organised students wizzed through this, so did additional posters when I didn't have them doing the maths activities fore mentioned.  My classroom is now colourfully arrayed with a variety of posters about these countries, sports and medallists.

Our school is also doing a mini-Olympics with the help of our wonderful Sport Waikato Energizer, Garth.  It was supposed to happen a couple of weeks ago, but due to weather and the flu season, we will be doing it this week.  Can't wait.

But now we are observing the Paralympics through our Newsboard  each day and we are amazed by Sophie Pascoe and the age of some of the Paralympians in the NZ team.

Anzac Day Mulitple Intelligence Unit

Anzac Day is extremely important in New Zealand, and Australia.  Who else would celebrate/commemorate such a disasterous defeat, recognising it as the true birth of nationhood, an emergance from colonial imperialism.

Each year I do an Anzac unit in my class.  I try to mix it up each year.  Below is this year's unit based on Gardners Multiple Intelligences:

The focus of these activities mostly fell on Verbal-Linguistic and Visual-Spacial.  You will note that some text is highlighted in a different colour and underlined.  The text is hyperlinked to various websites to enable the students to complete the activities.  I've also included these hyperlinks in this blog for your interest.  The students also have a hard copy of this glued in their topic books and they save a digital copy in their folders so they can access the links.

You will note that the activities cover the New Zealand Land Wars (Rewi's Last Stand - this is local to our school as we drive past the Orakau Battle Site each time we go to town), World War 1 in Gallipoli and the Western Front (Eat Like an Anzac in WW1) and World War 2 in the Pacific and Crete.

I've tried to cover a variety of skills and activities in this unit.  The students were required to physically do activities, record voice, take photos, plot on maps, write letters and present their information in a variety of ways - digitally and with pen and paper.

With The Battle of Crete section the students went to an NZ History site where four veterans of Crete tell their stories.  My students were asked to listen and then script and record in Audacity (download for free by googling Audacity) with one student being an interviewer and the other the veteran.  It actually took a bit of talking and explaining to get them to understand that it wasn't all about the bombs and mates dying.  Some of them really got into the feel of an old man's voice as well.  Each pair improved on the last.  Sometimes it is cool to be last rather than first.

The Pacific War with Japan section focused on a group of men who we don't really know a lot about, and their fate, the coastwatchers stationed on Pacific Islands and about Papua New Guinea.  The NZ Herald had a great article about one coastwatcher, who did survive the Japanese invasion of many Pacific Islands and the subsequent beheading many coastwatchers suffered, and became a prisoner of war in Japan.  Apart from the research to find out what a coastwatcher is and a bit of comprehension from the article, the big skill here was to find a map of the Pacific and then work out where coastwatchers were stationed.  I try to use maps as often as possible.  Too many people don't know where places are (think of the Americans who think NZ has kangaroos or is in Scandanavia) so I endeavour to teach my students where in the world they are.

The section about Rewi's Last Stand was all about bringing in somewhere local that the children don't know much about, and the Land Wars that they also don't know much about.  Both the links in here go to different pages at nzhistory.net.nz, The Battle of Orakau and Rewi Manga Maniapoto.  There is the comprehension skills from reading about Rewi and doing a summary of the man, and also the focus of a timeline about the battle.  Again I have brought a map in, because it is amazing how many kids have know idea about their own district and where things lie.  Some of them just seem to hop in a car and go to sleep or play with a PSP!!  It's also a good exercise is getting them to spell those localities as well.

Eat Like an Anzac in WW1 has a lot in it... and more work came from this section that is not included.  The Scale of Rations activity was all about some IT skills of finding a picture, copy and paste (some of my kids needed this practise) and how to use the space.  I wanted it done in A3... amazing how many did it in A4 - so they had to make the adjustments.... another good lesson in following instructions and some more IT skills.

         

These pictures show what some of my students did to complete this activity.

Have you ever eaten hard tack?  Well, I recommend having your dentist on speed dial!!  This is the third time I have done the Anzac lunch, where we ate a meal similar to what the soldiers at Gallipoli would have eaten, minus the flies!!

That's hard tack with jam, rice and bully beef (aka canned corned beef) and tea made with a bit of sugar and milk powder.  Next time I may include canned peas.  We made the hard tack ourselves.  The recipe can be found at the Australian War Memorial education site.

The hard tack before cooking.

   

From this piece of work we also did a spot of persuasive writing with the idea being Could I eat like an Anzac at Gallipoli for eight months?  Believe me, not many of the kids enjoyed eating the bully beef.  It tastes like cat food!!!  I may talk about this piece of work in another blog, but here is a teaser below.

   

We make Anzac Biscuits every year in my class.  They are too yummy not to make them!!  We use the recipe from the Edmonds Cookbook, like all good Kiwis.  I have talked about the process of this activity in another blog, because the whole focus of this activity was for the children to communicate how to make the biscuits in PhotoStory 3 to someone who does not have the recipe.  Read the other blog (Using PhotoStory 3 in class) to know more.

The final activity involves getting the children to think about what the ladies at the homefront did for the men at the frontline - knitting, food..... and how letters are so important, particularly as it was the main form of communication at the time.  So they read the letters Alister Robison wrote home and they also went to another nzhistory.net.nz site where it talks about the ladies and their work at the homefront for the soldiers at the front.  They had to write a letter to Alister like he was a member of their own family in 1916, and they had to hand write to publish.  I wanted them to include details of what was being sent to Alister because they needed to know that the army didn't provide everything, that the families also contributed so much to the soldiers to make the frontline more bareable.

For the students who were in my class last year, this built on what they had learned previously.  Below is a taster of what I asked my students to do last year.

  

   

The top left picture is the homework I set for the week that encompassed Anzac Day.  In that homework I wanted the children to share baking Anzac Biscuits with their family at home, find out what Anzac Day means to their family with a family discussion, find an article in the newspaper (or online) about Anzac Day to share with the class and research about a member of their own family who has served in the NZ armed forces (hopefully finding out something they didn't know before and talking to some elders in their family).

The Postcard activity in the middle aims to get the child to put themselves in the situation of being at Galipolli and writing a letter home explaining the conditions and daily life.

The other three (top right and the two at the bottom) are examples of fourteen inquiries I set up to give students a choice.  It mixs up the Gardner's Multiple Intelligences with DeBono's Thinking Hats to provide the students with a range of research, thinking, creating and processing challenges.

Also, see my previous blog about Anzac Poppies and Medals, as we did those last year too.