St Mary Redcliffe and Temple School

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Values Project - Lesson Plan Title:

Letters from the Front

Subject:
History

Keywords:
Warfare,

Resources:
Video "All quiet on the Western Front", Factsheet

Year Group:
    9

Values:
Valuing others, Forgiveness

Teaching and Learning Styles:
Group discussion, video, letter writing
Context in which the lesson is set Courses of World War One. Strengths and weaknesses of alliances in Europe using factsheets and worksheets . Outbreak of trench warfare and the failure of the Schlieffen plan. Personal implication of life in the trenches - sanitation, fear, injury, death, living conditions.
What the lesson is about Understanding how the value of human life is threatened in warfare and how people are likely to respond to that threat. Understanding and forgiveness were separated in pupils minds, which was an important advance in thinking.
Expected outcomes A deeper understanding of the personal implications of warfare.
Details of Teacher and Pupil Activities Watch sections of "All quiet on the Western Front". Class discussion on the implications of an incident in the film where one soldier kills another in a shell hole.

Phase 1
Pupils then write from one of three perspectives:

  1. An officer writing to the parents of someone killed on duty
  2. A soldier writing to the parents of someone he has killed
  3. A soldier writing home about what he feels about having killed someone

Phase 2
Letters were exchanged so that each pupil received a letter that had been written in Phase 1, but from a different perspective than the one they wrote. They then wrote a reply to that letter

Each letter was then read out to the class and discussion was carried out about a) historical inaccuracies b) (In)appropriateness of the emotional response
Extension Work None