World War 1 History Unit

We have been focusing on the 20th Century for Blaze's history lessons this year. We are currently learning about the Great Depression, but we spent quite a bit of time learning about World War 1.

The causes of WW1:


We read the following two novels:





When Christmas Comes Again was about a young military telephone operator during the war. After the Dancing Days was about a girl dealing with the loss of a beloved uncle during the war and the injured and deformed soldiers who returned to the United States after the war.

Blaze was particularly interested in aviation during WW1. We found a simple model of the Red Baron's  plane that Blaze was able to assemble without help, at a local hobby shop.





We watched two movies about German pilots,  The Blue Max and The Red Baron, along with some short documentaries about WW1 planes on YouTube.





We then focused our attention on trench warfare.









We also watched War Horse.



Blaze used a shoe box to make a diorama of a WW1 trench with American soldiers. The soldiers were paper dolls that were originally printed in 1918 and can be found here. We didn't use the paper stands for the dolls, but instead glued them onto 1-inch wooded blocks, so they wouldn't tip over so easily.



To give the shoe box diorama a real "hole in the ground" look, Blaze painted the entire box with school glue and sprinkled it with dirt.





After the glue was dry, I sprayed the whole thing with clear coat, so the dirt wouldn't fall off.

The sandbags were made from Crayola Model Magic.



The culmination of all of our WW1 studies was Blaze's display for the Tallahassee Homeschool Group's International (Social Studies) Fair.



Here is a recipe for the donuts that were passed out by the Salvation Army to soldiers during WW1:
http://www.justapinch.com/recipes/bread/sweet-bread/original-salvation-army-world-war-1-donut.html