Implementation of ‘Letters and postcards from war times’ (SOI-RO-15)
This Learning Scenario was created by Heathcliff Schembri, Europeana Ambassador for Malta and implemented by Emilia Alexe from Romania.
About the implementation
The implementation lasted for 3 lessons. I adapted it to my situation and the subjects I teach. I have chosen almost the same category of students aged 11-12, grade 6. Since it involves many subjects I set it as a project-based activity.
I focused on English, Social Science, ICT and Art. As topics for English I taught Formal/Informal letters, the structure of postcards, types of shapes – vocabulary and dialogue writing, the topic also included in the Romanian curriculum. As a digital tool we used padlet which worked as a teaching resource and also as a collaborative tool. We also used Mentimeter as a brainstorming activity and Europeana.eu as a resource.
An introduction to letters and postcard from war times
First of all, I presented the Europeana platform to my students and got them familiarised with it. They used images as resources to design their postcards. Then, they learned about the differences between formal and informal letters and postcards. They searched for information about World War II in Romania and presented it to their colleagues.
In class, they imagined they had a relative fighting in the WWI and they wrote an informal or formal postcard as a response to one of the letters/postcards chosen from the Europeana collection website. Using Mentimeter they had to answer the question: ”Why/when do we write postcards?” In the Art lessons, they designed different shapes of postcards and searched for models on the Europeana platform. They learned about how to collaborate on Padlet developing their digital skills.
In addition, for Social Science –we discussed in Romanian about what led to the start of WWI, about the conflicts, people’s reactions. The students also searched for the present conflicts in the world in 2018. As for the last activity, they had to write a dialogue imagining they would live in 2050 and talk about a current conflict from 2018, or write the dialogue in the form of an interview. The students’ postcards were uploaded on the class Padlet. During all the activities they worked in pairs. The 21st competences involved in my implementation lesson were critical thinking, collaboration, communication, digital skills, global awareness.
My students were active participants and enjoyed the topics I had proposed.
You can find some of the work they produced, by clicking here.
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- ‘Letters and Postcards from War Times’, implemented by Judit Benedek
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CC BY-SA 3.0 – The featured image used to illustrate this article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution. It is has been provided by Mrs Beryl Eichmann , contributor for the Europeana 1914-1918 collection. You can find the image by clicking here.