The first thing that the majority of our class thought of when they heard “World War 1” was the ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Army Corp). Whilst brainstorming ideas, we decided to read some articles that we’d found in school journals about unknown war stories and we came up with ideas of how we could incorporate these stories in our project. In the end, we decided to make posters using visual images and information that we’d found by reading the articles and researching online.

Some of our topics included; Germans living in New Zealand during WW1, children in NZ in WW1, nurses on the front, propaganda, conscription and NZ soldiers in WW1 to name a few. We got into pairs and chose a topic to create a poster on. We then researched in our pairs about our topic to gather all the information we needed to make our posters. In our pairs we worked online using programs such as Microsoft Word and Publisher to successfully create an informative, intriguing and visually appealing poster to send to France.

As well as making posters on a chosen topic, we also researched specific battles that New Zealand was involved in. We tried to steer clear of the battle of Gallipoli as everyone already knew a lot about it, and we wanted to be able to learn something from what we were researching. The battles that we chose to research included the battle of Passchendaele, Arras, Romani, Somme and Messines. We created fact files for each of the battles that we researched and found answers to questions such as “What was the aim of the battle?” and “How many men from New Zealand were killed?”

We are now preparing to send our posters and our fact files to France so that they can see our work and learn about New Zealand’s involvement in World War 1, and so that they can include our work in their exhibition for our shared histories project.

We have included one of our posters in this post.