Implementation of ‘Letters and postcards from war’ (SOI-HU-65)

I have chosen this Learning Scenario (LS) because it perfectly fits into my curriculum. In the coursebook, I teach from, there is a unit about World Wars I-II. My students are older than in the original LS. But I thought that the use of letters written during both world wars from Europeana can make the lesson more authentic.

Amendments

Firstly, I used the LS for teaching English as a second language so I omitted the first part of the original scenario. Students had to write a postcard and they decorated it but the closing part of the project and its aim was writing a postcard in English.

Instead of writing dialogue, we talked about the characteristics of a formal letter and as homework, they translated the letter.

After translating the letters, my students had to prepare a postcard and answer to the letter, they translated.

We exhibited the postcards in the class.

The project

1st lesson

First I asked some questions about the most important national holidays. Then, in pairs, my students had to match war vocabulary to their explanations. later, we watched a youtube video about Poppy Day. They had to answer questions while listening.

2nd Lesson

I introduced Europeana to my students. They had to find letters written during WWI and WWII in pairs. Similarly to the original LS, we talked about how to write an informal letter.

3rd Lesson

I changed only parts of the lesson. We discussed what would make a postcard attractive, we talked about warm and cold colo

Conclusion

My students liked the project because they could use their creativity. Mostly it was difficult for them to read the handwritten letters. I hope they will understand better, why it is important for teachers to get legible tests. They were impressed by the handmade postcards. I was happy too because they used English.

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? You might also like:

• ‘Letters and Postcards from War Times’, implemented by Judit Benedek 
• Implementation of ‘The great war through children’s eyes’, by Emanuela Leto
• Implementation of ‘Letters and Postcards from War Times’, by
  Carmen Morenoliso 

Do you want to discover more stories of implementation? Click here.

CC BY-SA 3.0 – The featured image used to illustrate this article originally comes from the Europeana 1914-1918 Collection.