child-led learning

My son has been LOVING doing research papers.  He’s just finished a rather significant one of poison gas, and as he finished he asked “what’s next mom?”  I mentioned we hadn’t talked about propaganda and how it was handled during the war and he was immediately intrigued.   Since it was our research week we set to. 

First we Watched Videos

Three types of propaganda

1. Homefront – for people at home
2. Front – to increase morale among your troops andweaken it in the enemy
3. Foreign  – to counter the propaganda of the enemy

Censorship and propaganda often went hand in hand.

It was thought that film could easily be used as a method of propaganda even though it was still fairly new.  But it was very difficult to get film of war battles.  They needed permission, subject to censorship, hard to carry and set up, and light sensitive (most battles happened at night). 

Posters were most often directed at men with national emblems surrounding a healthy modern Canadian man.  Shaming posters were also used.  

We enjoyed the sheer variety in the posters. From the Victory Bond posters, to the enlist now. The different units like the Canadian Irish Rangers. We noted that some WW2 posters were slipped in as well.

You want to show the enemy as beatable, and yet you also want to show him as formidable.   Finding that balance was often difficult. 

Then we took to the books

He read selections from these books.

My goal was to have him research one of the foci of propaganda and then do up a poster showing what he learned.   He wants to do this BUT he also wants to write a paper.  I imagine it will take him two weeks to be happy with his research and the paper he comes up with. In the meantime I will learn lots about wartime propaganda! 🙂

Others in this Series

• Belgium
• Animals in World War One
• Soldiers in Training
• Assassination
• Pre_war Alliances
• War Starts
• Trench Warfare.
• Trench Foot Experiment.
• Eastern Front.
• Battles of WW1.
• Sea Battles.
• Submarines.
• Airplanes. 
• Poison Gas. 

Did you know that France was actually the first company to use poison gas in World War 1? I didn’t either. Learn more amazing facts in the video below.

Welcome to Our study of Poison Gas of World War 1.

My son has been longing to tackle this topic but I deliberately held it off until the nicer weather. I’ve been imagining my son wanting to make smoke bombs and what not to test wind patterns. Nice weather makes that a whole lot easier to do eh? 🙂

BUT on to our study. We watched a number of videos. 🙂

Types of gas used

• tear gas – not truly dangerous, more of a nuisance
• chlorine gas – burning eyes, nose, mouth
• phosgene gas, sometimes mixed with chlorine gas killed 85% of all gases used.
• mustard gas – the most painful of all gases

Learning about Chlorine gas

Phosgene gas. 85% of all people who died from Chemical warfare died from this gas. Freshly mown gas smell. 80,000 people.

Mustard Gas. Though in this video the creator was wrong in stating that the Germans started the poison gas attacks. They did grab onto the idea rather firmly though. Mustard gas was named for its yellow-brown colour and mustard smell. It was a nasty gas which didn’t dissipate easily and would sink to lower levels and stuck around for years. Exposure to skin contact leads to blistering and burns. It could be very disfiguring.

Learning about the disfigurement of mustard gas led us to learn about Anna Coleman Watts/Ladd and her work making masks for these poor soldiers.

Videos My Son Picked:

This only the first half of this video is on poison gas.

The history of Fritz Haber. Haber was a Jewish German Chemist who thought that chemical warfare would end the war more quickly. Even though it didn’t. He never apologized for his work or actions. As a Jew he was later unwelcome in Hitler’s Germany. He died in Switzerland from a heart attack. He found himself unwelcome in many places due to his work in chemical warfare.

Small box Respirator. This video led us to learn more about the small box respirator through the Canadian War Museum. I think, Lieutenant Dockar, a Canadian, wrote this article. We learned a good bit reading that article. Close up’s of the SBR can be found here.

Reading

The lad did some reading from various books and downloaded product.

Other posts about world  war one

• Belgium
• Animals in World War One
• Soldiers in Training
• Assassination
• Pre_war Alliances
• War Starts
• Trench Warfare.
• Trench Foot Experiment.
• Eastern Front.
• Battles of WW1.
• Sea Battles.
• Submarines.
• Airplanes. 

After studying the sea battles of world war 1 we thought perhaps we were done until we remembered submarines.  That deserved another week of study!  

We started our study as always with Youtube.

We found it interesting that submarines were thought useless in battle until Kaiser Wilhelm took a ride and loved them, he ordered Germany to start building submarines. Other highlights included: The Electric Boat Company became General Dynamics a major USA based submarine company, the USA was first to use diesel engines in their submarines and Great Britain has 74 submarines built at the start of the war.

Highlights: Submarines changed the face of war. The Germans made the most use of submarines during the war. Living conditions were absolutely horrible due to the use of kerosene lamps and close quarters.

I liked how they talked about what to do with you were in the water, keeping your eyes in the Horizon looking for help.

German high command decided that risking battle with the USA, and ignoring the laws of humanity was necessary in order to win the war.

The lad did some reading in World War 1 History for kids.

His goal this week is to research the changes in submarines from the beginning of the war to the end. Lots of different advances were made. He has since expanded that project as he’s learning a ton and thoroughly enjoying the process. 🙂

I have to admit to feeling a bit surprised.   I thought, battles of the war, how complicated could it be.  BOY, was I wrong.  Led to a rather fierce discussion between the lad and I about how I could be so wrong!   But hey, we worked it through and have decided to divide this section into part.

Battles of the Western front, and the eastern front.  Then battles of Africa.   We’ll tackle sea battles and air battles.   But last week and this week we are just going for the general approach.. just getting a bit of an overview of the battles of World War 1. 

Movies Watched

To that end, we watched a few different movies.  Flyboys. and The Red Baron.  We tried watching The Trench (don’t recommend it).   We have plans to watch Warhorse documentary and War Horse but so far we can’t get a stream that works. 

Books Read

The lad read through these books below, just select pages that talked about battles of the war in generic terms, or as a broad overview.

The goal is to have him find a battle he wants to research from a Canadian point of view, but so far none of them are grabbing his attention.

We also read through a book called Vimy Oaks because I was just intensely curious.  It took us a couple of nights to read through.  Thoroughly enjoyed this book. We found it fascinating that the oaks from France eventually found a way back after all the destruction.

Videos Watched

Would we be us if we didn’t watch some videos as well?

Watching how the line moved so much at first and then just kind of stalled, reminded us of how HARD and kinda pointless trench warfare would have seemed to the men involved.

Resources Used

We used a variety of resources for this unit study.   These include writing prompts from Bonnie Rose.   Heather LeBlanc’s Major Battles and Events of WW1 and Military Geography from TOS.    We used a timeline from someone but I can’t find a link to it… Might have been a free unit we picked up somewhere, I can’t truly recall.

Other posts about world  war one

• Belgium
• Animals in World War One
• Soldiers in Training
• Assassination
• Pre_war Alliances
• War Starts
• Trench Warfare.
• Trench Foot Experiment.