Week One - ANZAC Literacy

Talofa Lava bloggers and welcome to Term Two,

We have had a busy start to the term this week. During our Literacy learning, we have been focusing on the theme of ANZACs and ANZAC day. This is because ANZAC day was acknowledged during the second week of the school holidays.

For creative writing, we described what we thought it would have been like in a Trench and wrote home to describe this experience using our senses.  To help get a better understanding we read two picture books, Jim's Letters by Glyn Harper and The ANZAC Puppy by Peter Millet and Trish Bowles. The illustrations in these books helped us to learn and plan what we would include in our writing.

Using our plan, we then created a piece of writing, focusing on using simple and compound sentences to describe what we saw and what was happening.  Here are two examples of writing below,

Daiki's writing:
 Dear Mum and Dad,
How are you both feeling? Here in the trench it is not going well!  It is not good for children to stay here. I am feeling sad because bandage around  my friends bodies. Now we are going to get our guns out. On the top of the hill I can hear the gunshots coming close to me and I can also hear the Bullets going into the water or sea. I Could smell the blood  from the people that died  in the war. I can feel the pain in the injury that I have and I can also feel the dust going into my eyes. I miss home because we don't have time to have showers. I can’t sleep that well because of the explosion of the bombs. BOOM! CRASH! BAM! I wish that I could be at home right now. My clothes and socks smell like the sewer YUCK!. MY tummy is saying I want to have a Barbecue.
I hope you guys are having fun.

TJ's writing:
Dear family
How are you all? The trench is not a safe place for the children. We are feeling sad because people are getting shot, even some of my friends. When I run  through the water, I can hear lots of splashes. The gunshots and bombs smells like smoke.  My dirty stinky clothes feel gross .I can see rain dropping. I am worried because I hope the children won't do this when they are my  age .I am scared because I think I'm going to be dead. I am afraid  because we're getting less soldiers. I'm looking forward to getting home I can't wait to taste  mums best biscuits. And I can't wait to play with the children.
From TJ

We hope to use our creation skills to publish these on a postcard too. Please feel free to leave some postiive, thoughtful and helpful comments.

A fitting end to Term One

At the end of Term One, Waikowhai Primary School held a special assembly to acknowledge ANZAC day. This is because it will happen while we are away from school on our school holiday break.

As you can see, the school hall was set up beautifully by Ms Sands.  A poppy garden was created at the front of the hall.  Children from each class came up to lay poppies in remembrance.  We displayed the crosses honouring fallen soldiers from our ANZAC centenary presentations two years ago at the front of the class.

A group of our Senior students helped by sharing a little bit of information about ANZAC day with younger members of our school community.  We also listened to the last post, observed a minute's silence and used our fabulous singing voices together as a special way to finish of the term.  We then finished the assembly as a syndicate while Ms Sands read us an ANZAC related picture book. You will be able to find this in the sophisticated picture book section of the library.

Room 8 focused on some ANZAC activities during the week.  One of the highlights was the creation of acrostic poems.  Below you can see the shared writing that Room 8 did before we went to create our own from the word bank below.

We would love to hear how you acknowledged ANZAC day.  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment in the comments section below.