World
War II
Abstract: This is an
interdisciplinary overview of the major aspects, events, and implications of
World War II. It will be taught
through the subject areas of English, technology, psychology, and history in an
effort to make the information meaningful to students through a complete study.
English will provide a literature study of The
Diary of Anne Frank showing first hand accounts of those who experienced the
holocaust. In technology the students will be able to examine the
innovations that were utilized during wartime and that came about as a result of
the war effort. In psychology the
students will examine experiments performed that can explain why rational people
would perform irrational acts, such as being a member of the Nazi party. History
will show an objective view of the facts surrounding the causes of World War II
and the major events of the war. All
lessons and plans have suggested adaptations for students with various special
needs. Through this collaborative
project the students will be challenged in their study and develop a more
holistic view of the subject area. This will be accomplished through the viewing
of WWII in the different disciplines.
Names of Team Members:
Abigail Hursh- Special
Education (Deaf Education)
Sharyn Goldrich- Special Education (LD/BD)
Aylin Arin- English
Eric Cowell- Technology
Ashley McKinney- Social Sciences
Matt O’Brien- History
Subjects Integrated:
English: literature examining
victims of the holocaust
Technology: Examination of World
War II Innovations and Technology
Psychology: Examining the
Importance of Group Membership and Authority
figures
History: Examination of Major
Causes and Events of World War II
Objectives:
Upon completion of this unit, the student will be able to orally discuss the
living environments of victims of the holocaust.
Upon completion of this unit, the students will be able to explain motivations
that might have caused those to join the Nazi party and the general motivations
that people have to become members of a group.
Upon the completion of this unit, the students will be able to name at least two
causes of World War Two.
Upon completion of this unit, students will be able to name at least two
important political figures and the motivating sources surrounding their
participation in WWII.
Upon completion of this unit, the students will have knowledge of at least two
technological innovations that came about as a result of WWII.
Rationale:
Why develop a cooperative curriculum unit (for the students)?
Using an interdisciplinary approach to learning makes the knowledge meaningful
to the students through the duration of the unit
The students will be able to discuss one particular unit of study throughout the
day, allowing for them to accomplish the specific class’s goals as well as
allowing for the students to process the material in a meaningful manner.
The students will be able to identify how meaningful the application of their
knowledge can be in a cooperative classroom
The students will gain adequate knowledge over a subject area
All homework will relate to each other making the task more meaningful and less
daunting.
Cooperative learning allows the students to get to know each other better and to
hear others ideas in a non-threatening atmosphere.
Why develop a cooperative curriculum unit (for the teachers)?
The teachers will be working as a team instead of as separate entities.
The teachers will be able to accomplish their personal goals wile assisting
other teachers in accomplishing theirs.
The students are more interested in the teachings of the teachers because it is
being taught to them in an all-encompassing manner and made more interesting.
Resources Needed:
Psychology: The films on Milgram’s Shock Experiment and the Stanford
Prison Experiment. Pictures of the Nazi army and a psychology text covering the
importance of group membership would be helpful.
English: The book and video of “The Diary of Anne Frank”
Technology: Film clips from “Pearl Harbor”, “Extreme Machines”, and
“Indiana Jones.” The Last Crusade”. Foods such as MRE will be used in
class.
Unit Description:
English
The Diary of Anne Frank
Week 1
Monday
Read aloud in class, summarize reading, answer any questions students have
Tuesday
Read aloud in class, summarize reading, answer any questions students have
Wednesday
Read aloud in class, summarize reading, answer any questions students have
Thursday
In-class silent reading, summarize reading, answer any questions students have
Friday
Read aloud in class (finish book), cover main points of the story, assign
discussion questions for homework (I have made up ten study questions)
*At-home reading will be assigned for homework Monday thru Thursday.
*Also, starting on the first day of reading The
Diary of Anne Frank (Monday) students will keep their own personal journal
throughout the two-week lesson. They
will be asked to record their feelings and thoughts while reading the book.
Students should write in this journal everyday, so by the time they turn
it in they should have eight entries.
Week 2
Monday
Class discussion on homework questions. Everyone
must participate in discussion order to receive crucial participation points.
Tuesday
Movie Day: The Diary of Anne Frank
Wednesday
Movie Day: The Diary of Anne Frank
Thursday
Movie Day: The Diary of Anne Frank
Journals are due.
Friday
On the last day of the Anne Frank unit the class will spend half the day at the
Holocaust Memorial museum in town. The
tour of the museum and its different exhibits will conclude the very informative
two week unit.
Discussion Questions
1. Name five things that you didn't know before about Anne Frank that you found
out in the reading.
2. The diary was written by Anne Frank almost 60 years ago.
If Anne Frank had survived, she would have been 73 years old right now.
Does Anne Frank's language sound "old" to you or does she write
like a "regular" teenager would today?
3. Pretend you were given a diary for as your birthday present.
Write your first entry in it below describing your day (please write at
least six sentences -- remember Anne's first diary entry was 13 sentences long!)
4. What do you get from the text about Anne's opinion of her mother, her father
(Pim), and Mrs. Van Daan? Back up
your thoughts with specific examples or quotes from the text.
5. Does the fact that the Frank family celebrates St. Nicholas Day and Hanukkah
surprise you?
6. If you had to live in hiding, and could not make a sound from 9:00 a.m. to
6:00 p.m. everyday (except Sunday), and had no electronic toys to entertain
yourself, what would you do with yourself?
7. Have you ever had a friend spend the week or weekend over at your house?
How have you felt after that weekend was over that you never wanted to
see that person again since they "got on your nerves" during the
weekend? Imagine, like Anne, you had to spend two years of your life
in hiding with seven other people. How
would it make you feel?
8. Do you think Peter really is as fond of Anne as she thinks he is?
9. Now that you have read most of the Diary, how do you think Anne, a typical
teenager of the time, reacted to the non-typical situation of the Holocaust?
Was Anne an eternal optimist, did she hope for what would never occur? Or did she realize that she would never survive the war?
Give me your feelings about Anne and the Diary in several sentences
below.
10. In your opinion, what will it take for humankind to cure itself of the urge
for war, murder, and rage? Or are
we doomed to always repeat the cycle of war and peace?
Special Education Adaptations
Because this unit requires a lot of reading aloud, the students with special
needs should be provided with an opportunity to read the material at home prior
to the read aloud in class. This
will allow them to read at their own speed, find out about sections they may not
understand, and be prepared for that days reading and discussion.
Some students may require a more strictly formatted journal such as being
provided with questions to answer. Students
with more severe cognitive disabilities may require shorter stories in place of
the long text to aid in remembering details and language level.
Students with vision disabilities should be provided with the text in
enlarged print or braille.
Technology Education
The Technology unit for World War II will primarily be based upon
technologies that were invented before or during the war, but for the most part
were utilized as a major part of the war effort, or came as a result of wartime
technologies. The WWII unit will span a period of two weeks or 10 days.
The first week of the unit will focus mainly on an introduction to
wartime inventions and technologies, infantry technologies, land vehicles, and
ships. Monday of the first week will be primarily used to get
students thinking about the technology of WWII.
It will be started off with an open discussion where students from their
prior knowledge bring up any wartime technologies they know of from WWII.
Students will then get a brief overview of many of the basic technologies
that came out of the WWII era which not only influenced many technologies then,
but many technologies of even today. Examples
of these would be long range television broadcasting, the computer, the
internet, jet engines, the atomic bomb, etc.
Tuesday will involve a discussion of the infantry and their standard
issue equipment. There will be an
example of a soldier’s WWII gear pack which will give students a better
understanding of what was contained in it and help them in learning the
concepts. The rations that soldiers
had to eat will also be discussed and students will be given the opportunity to
sample a newer type of ration called the MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) to help them
to understand what it would be like to eat rations everyday.
Wednesday students will be taught about troop transportation technologies
including jeeps, amphibious vehicles, etc (excluding tanks).
Students will be shown a 10 min. clip from a program “Extreme
Machines” from The Learning Channel that shows the development of the Jeep
which became an integral part of troop transportation in WWII. Thursday we will discuss the different types of Tanks used
during WWII on both the Axis and the Allied powers sides. A 10 min. film clip on WWII Tanks from the program “Extreme
Machines” from The Learning Channel will be shown to give the students an idea
of what those different types of tanks looked like in action and their
development background. To grab the
student’s attention at the beginning of the class period and a 5 min. film
clip will be shown from the action adventure movie “Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade” where Indiana Jones has to fight to gain control of a WWII German
Nazi tank. Friday we will discuss
the many types of war ships used during WWII including destroyers.
We will also discuss the development of aircraft carriers allowing
bombers to take off from the deck of a ship.
A 15 minute film clip from the movie “Pearl Harbor” will be shown
which outlines the development of carrier take-off technology.
This technology was devised for the Doolittle Raid which was a
retaliatory strike by the U.S. on Japan after the Pearl Harbor Attack.
The second week of the Unit will focus on review of previous material,
coding technologies, submarines, blimps, aircraft, and the development of the
atomic bomb. Monday will be
utilized to discuss the German coding machine the “Enigma Machine”.
We will also discuss the Navajo American wind talkers enlisted by the
U.S. forces. Along with the
presentation of many pictures the class will get the opportunity to encode a
message on an Enigma Machine simulator located at “http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~russell/classes/enigma/”
and then email it to someone else in another state and see if they can decode
the message using the same simulator and send the class a coded response so that
we may deceiver it the next class period. We
will also discuss the unbroken code devised in the Navajo language which was
used by the U.S. Military. The last
10 min. of the period will be used for review of material covered in the last
half of the unit and for any questions the students might have.
Tuesday in class we will discuss submarines and the use of German U-Boats
against Allied ships. We will also
watch film clips of the capture of the first German U-Boat submarine, which
resides at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, IL.
Wednesday we will discuss the development of blimps.
We will also discuss the positives and negatives about blimps and see
footage of the famous Hindenburg crash. Thursday
the many types of WWII aircraft will be discussed including some of the Axis
powers aircraft such as the Japanese Zeros which where powered by Mercedes Benz
engines. Film clips showing some of
the WWII aircraft in a dog fight will also be shown to help students better
understand the plane’s fighting capabilities.
Friday to cap off the unit on WWII we will discuss the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and how the two bombs “Fat Man” and
“Little Boy” were developed as the secret Manhattan Project.
We will also discuss how they were made and show film clips of the
de-classified atomic bomb tests done by the U.S. Military.
Finally we will discuss the societal implications of using that
technology to end the war. In the
last 15 minutes we will do a quick review of everything covered in the unit and
give students the opportunity to ask questions about any of the material
covered.
Special Education Adaptations
It would be beneficial to find a student who would be willing to take
notes for the students with disabilities. During
discussion time, the teacher should write down on an overhead or chalkboard the
main points brought up. This will
aid in the visual comprehension of material discussed.
Any film clips watched should be close-captioned.
For many of the technological developments discussed, it may be
beneficial to bring in actual models or pictures of the items for students to
examine and touch.
Psychology Discipline
When examining World War Two and the situation surrounding it students
will inevitably ask “What could make a seemingly rational person become a
member of the Nazi Army?” While the other classes are examining the historical
situations surrounding the holocaust and reading firsthand accounts of those
that were victims of the Nazi party this unit in psychology will examine what
would make everyday people perform such heinous acts. This unit will fit
perfectly into an introductory psychology course since a good portion of
psychologists have examined the importance of group membership for an
individual. Social psychologists regularly discuss the meaning of certain group
memberships to an individual and the empowerment that an individual might feel
as a result of this membership.
In an attempt to explain to the class why one might have joined the Nazi
party (not to make excuses for but to examine), there are three psychological
experiments that I will examine during this week. The first day the students
will examine through film the Stanford Prison Experiment performed in 1973 by
Philip Zimbardo. This experiment shows students on the same campus acting out
strongly against each other when placed in role-playing positions where some
were the prisoners and others were the prison guards. The second day of the unit
the students will be shown another experiment that shows a peer acting in a
demeaning manner towards another simply because they were told they were better
by an authority figure was the “Blue Eyed” experiment performed by Jane
Elliot in 1968. By simply telling the students with brown eyes that they were
superior the class began to act as if that was the case. The final psychological
study for examination will be used on the third day of the unit. It will cover
video on one of the most telling experiments when considering the Nazi party is
the Milgram Obedience Experiment. Here participants were told to shock a fellow
participant they could not see, if they failed to answer a question correctly.
All of the participants administered shocks to the highest degree because they
were told to.
These examples can be used to explain to students the influence of
authority and the power of an average person to commit a horrible act. The
fourth and fifth days of the unit will be used to pose questions to the students
about the experiments. How is made them feel to watch, how they felt about
groups that they belonged to, how authority figures have control over them, and
how this relates to the Nazi party will all be openly discussed an evaluated.
The students will be assessed on their understanding of the power of group
membership and the consequences of blindly following a leader. The students will
be asked to develop a two page essay answering these questions.
The students should also take away from this week in the psychology class
a sense of tolerance for others that are not like them, even in the slightest of
ways. These experiments can be used to show what happens when one simply does
what they are told without questioning the outcome or the source.
In order to accommodate for the
student with a reading disability the majority of this unit will be covered in
open classroom discussion and in film. The Migram Obedience Experiment and the
Stanford Prison Experiment are on film. These films are interesting,
illustrative, and will not disadvantage any of the students. The open classroom
discussions of the experiments will benefit all because they will be able to
hear reactions from their peers on the studies, hopefully relating them to the
material and making it more meaningful.
Special Education Adaptations
As with the technological unit, videos used in this unit will need to be
close-captioned for any students who may require this.
Students should be provided with a notetaker for the movies and
discussion times. The teacher
should be sure to review the videos after watching them, highlighting main
points either by writing them on an overhead, or providing a handout to the
students. The essay at the end of
the unit may require an extended time for the student to work on it, or a
shorter assignment to meet the needs of any students with severe disabilities.
History
For my part of the lesson plan, I will be giving a narrative view of the Second
World War. This will not be a
typical chronological overview of the war.
I plan on going into some of the causes of the war, such as appeasement
and the peace settlement of World War I. I
also want to describe the war from a more objective view, not the typical
patriotic view given in world history textbooks.
By this point in their schooling, students already have a basic overview
of the events of World War II, so I want to give them more information.
The first week will be devoted to the beginnings of the war.
In addition to what I described above, I will also describe Hitler’s
(legitimate) rise to power and his early attacks on Europe.
I plan to map out the intricate web of treaties for both the axis and
allies. I want to talk about Pearl
Harbor and what we may have known before the attacks.
I will also spend a day talking about the technology and innovations that
came about due to the war.
The first three days of the second week will be spent talking about the war in
Europe. I will concentrate more on
operations Torch and Market Garden, as they are not as well known as D-Day.
I will talk about the significance of D-Day, what it took to bring it
about, and who was involved. By the end of the third day I will discuss how Hitler’s
empire collapsed under the two fronts. The final two days I will spend talking
about the war in the Pacific. The first day will cover the battles from Pearl
Harbor to midway, and the blunders of the Japanese navy at Pearl Harbor.
The second day will cover the remainder of the war, and a short debate on
whether atomic weapons were needed.
Special Education Adaptations
Any students with disabilities requiring a notetaker should again be
provided with one. Visual
representations of points discussed and aspects of the war through pictures or
movies could aid in understanding. Providing
the student with the topic of debate prior to the date of the debate may help by
allowing the student to fully prepare their thoughts and ideas so that they
might actively participate in the debate. The
teacher might consider providing the students with outlines of the material he
will cover prior to his lecture to help students follow his ideas.
References:
Dodge, Jefferson. “Speaker ‘Unmasks’ Practices of Discrimination.” New
Media. February
28th 2002.
Herken, Gregg. “The Building of the Bomb During World War Two and the Cold
War.” Saint
Martin’s Press. September 2002.
http://www.23nlpeople.com/Psychology.htm
http://www.lessonplans.com
http://www.ugrad.cs.jhu.edu/~russell/classes/enigma/
Warner, Philip. “World War Two: The Untold Story. Sterling Publishing Company.
May 2002.