Busy at work

On Monday we had a small group of children at Stepping Up. Each of them are working on a building a World War 1 environment using Minecraft. 

Creating

The students are very busy creating a World War 1 scene using Minecraft. They have been constructing and making improvements on their multi storey hospitals, trenches, cemeteries and jetties. 

Creating with Minecraft

We are quite engrossed with our project to create something using Minecraft, that reflects our learning about World War 1. 

We are building German tunnels, Red Cross hospitals and trenches, alongside cemeteries. 

Minecraft & Model Making

Today's Stepping Up session was very exciting as most of the students brought iPads along and spoke about the virtual worlds they are building using Minecraft. Lorin has been working at home to build a two-storey Red Cross hospital, complete with beds with red covers! He has also build a house with a memory room which contains poppies and a book about the war. Ivo has built the dock at Anzac Cove. Aaron has begun to build trenches and some tunnels. Rafa has made a war cemetery with flowers growing over the graves. Joe is just starting his 'world' so we will learn more about it next time after he has spent more time on it. 

It was great to see the students teaching each other how to construct things, and how to navigate the 'worlds' they are constructing. It's also fascinating to see how they are incorporating their learning about WW1 into their project. 

We looked at some photos of trenches today to get some ideas on how they looked. This is to help us to construct a model trench using papier mâché. We will be making the model inside a little box. 

We used wire cutters to cut some chicken wire which we are using to make a mould. It was quite hard for us to cut the wire, but we were persistent. Joe thought about how hard it would have been to cut the barbed wire in no mans land during the war. He was glad he didn't have to do the job!

Getting creative with Lego

Aaron has been working hard at home to create trenches using lego. He has done an amazing job hasn't he?

Making WW1 tributes

At our Stepping Up session today we framed a picture of the person we are researching. We worked out how to open the frame up then closed it back up again. 

Here is another little matchbox that was finished today. 

Some of us are working on creating a war scene using minecraft. We are very excited about it!

Matchbox craft

Today our group was a small one. We looked at some matchboxes that Miss Bland made to remember her great uncles who were in the war. Each one was different because it told a different person's story. We tried to see if we could understand what their stories were from the pictures and symbols on the boxes. 

Joe recognised the blood and bullet holes and knew that the soldier had received gunshot wounds. 

Lorin knew that a soldier had been a tunneller because of the picture he saw on the box. He also recognised that the soldier had both Australian and New Zealand connections because of the flags used. 

Aaron knew which soldier had met an untimely death from drowning because the matchbox had a ship on it. 

Ivo recognised the Red Cross on the box and knew that the soldier had been admitted to hospital. 

Each boy decorated their own matchbox with pictures of things that related to the person he was researching. Ivo put a picture of Anzac Cove on his box and a picture of the hospital tent because his soldier got really sick while serving on Gallipoli. 

Aaron and Lorin used pictures of horses on their boxes because their great uncles were both troopers. Lorin added an old Canadian flag and an old photo of cows too. This was to represent the fact that his great uncle was a dairy farmer and that he married a Canadian woman. 

Joe included a photo of an old World War 1 bakery in his box because his great grandfather was a baker during the war. 

Our matchboxes are not quite finished. We want to finish them at home with our families, then we will bring them back to school to be displayed with our research. 

WW1 style uniforms

We had a real treat today! We got to wear some WW1 style uniforms! Actually, the long pants would just fall off us cause we're so small, so only two of us had proper shorts to wear. Wearing the jackets and hats was still very exciting!

It was fun to march around the school and have heads turn and eyes gawk at us! We felt very proud. 

Helping to make giant poppies

We are helping to make some oversized poppies that will be used at the Bays Schools Festival in a couple of weeks. The choirs will be sing a bracket of war songs to commemorate 100 years since the start of World War 1. The poppies we are making will help the audience remember those who lost their lives. 

Here's a picture of the finished poppies. 

Working on our research

We have been researching people from our family who served in World War 1, or people bearing the same name as us. It has been tricky to understand the official documents, and especially difficult to read the cursive writing!

We've been writing a good copy of our research so that we can put it on display. 

Learning through photographs

Miss Bland visited the war exhibitions in Wellington during the holidays and she showed us the pictures she took. We really enjoyed looking at the photos of these huge models of our ANZAC soldiers-

We would love to visit this exhibition too so we can see it for ourselves! We will write a letter to Mr Limbrick to see if we can have permission to go on a Stepping Up trip to Wellington sometime soon. 

We were interested in the photo of a German field gun that some ANZACs captured in the war. It must have been quite an important gun to capture because someone brought it back to New Zealand after the war as a trophy!

This gun is now displayed next to the War Memorial in Waipawa. 

Something else that was intriguing for us today were these certificates that were given to Miss Bland's great uncle when he was discharged from army service. We noticed that the drawings were highly detailed and that both included the image of a lion. 

We learnt that the lion in the picture represents Great Britain, and the cubs, her allies. New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India... are all symbolized by the cubs. We noticed that the lion has caught something and killed it. We figured out that the eagle must be the symbol of Germany and its allies.