Blog#5: Points of view through letters in history

A student in one of my social studies class wrote a beautiful letter from an aid station behind the front lines at the Battle of the Somme. The writer was able to draw in my mind a vivid image of the carnage she saw as a nurse helping receive the wounded from the English first attack across No Man's Land. Not only was the letter a great writing prompt but it showed a deep understanding of the subject matter we had just experienced through a creative activity to explain trench warfare. The students wrote letters home after playing a trench warfare simulator game and I was pleasantly surprised at the depth of understanding I was seeing in the students letters. The letters were a good assessment of the student's knowledge but also showed some creative thoughts of different perspectives. There are some very useful strategies in Chapter 9 of Improving Adolescents Literacy and I can see some prompts that can be creatively used in different areas of social studies.

Learning through experience

Today, I witnessed the Battle of the Somme in a Ninth-Grade classroom. The class participated in a re-enactment of trench warfare. The students were divided into three groups, German, French and English as they came into the classroom. My host teacher and I had moved the desks and marked them with a numbering system. The desks were lined up in three tight rows with a large gap in between the two groups, "No Man's Land." At the sound of a whistle, the two sides threw colored paper wads at each other as they sat on the floor and used their desks as a trench system. We had three rounds of two minutes with a ten minute question and answer period in between to resupply the paper ammunition. It was a very enjoyable activity and the students were so enthused that I had to repeat the action with two later classes.
Got a lot of positive feedback and the students had to write a point of view "Letter from the Trenches" to some one at home. All in all it was a great activity and showed a critical understanding of World War I trench life and fighting.

Knowledge Through Visual Information

The power of an image is found in its ability to tell a story without a single letter of text. Visual information can be a support structure for content inquiry and help the student to associate images with complex ideas. When the image is a source of questioning, the use of graphic images can be a source of deeper inquiry. By asking the students to look at an image of an event and asking them what is happening, the student is forced to think of interpretation. The student becomes a history detective and puts into play all the information the student has as background knowledge to develop a visual story from the image given. Even when the interpretation is not correct the student has been acting upon known and inferred knowledge to generate a theory. Then the student can dig deeper to prove or disprove their assumption. This would appear a good strategy for deeper inquiry.