Anzac Day Whole Class School Journal Resource Year 7-8 – Underground Soldiers

Description

Strengthen your learners’ reading comprehension using this comprehensive tool, built around the “Underground Soldiers” piece from the Level 4 June 2014 School Journal. Ideal for bolstering your structured literacy approach and for an integrated exploration of Anzac Day.

This teaching resource immerses students in robust comprehension activities, vocabulary development, grammar, syntax, sentence construction, logical reasoning, and factual knowledge – all foundational aspects of effective reading instruction.

“Underground Soldiers” recounts the remarkable courage and expertise of New Zealand tunnellers during World War I. Braving constant threats from explosions, gas attacks, and enemy forces, they constructed a hidden network beneath Arras, facilitating a pivotal Allied advance. This article brings to light their crucial, often overlooked contribution to the war effort.

How to Implement:

This resource is tailored for whole-class instruction. You’ll receive a dynamic 88-slide presentation, supplementary support materials, and visual organisers.

Simply project the School Journal PDF onto your display and distribute printed copies of the text to groups of 2-3 students. With the slides in Presenter View, you’ll have a complete lesson plan at your fingertips—ready to use with a simple click. The text is divided into three manageable sections for two instructional sessions, allowing ample time for in-depth vocabulary and content exploration. Accompanying the text are a series of discussion prompts designed to stimulate student dialogue and critical thinking about the material.

On days four and five, deepen the exploration through:

• A GIST summarising activity
• A sequential text structure analysis graphic organiser
• Thought-provoking questions to foster deeper connections and inferences.

Key Features:

• Emphasis on monitoring understanding, summarising, drawing conclusions, and supporting claims with evidence.
• Comprehension tasks that move beyond simple recall. Literacy activities tied to essential writing skills:
  • complex sentences
  • sentence expansion using conjunctions (because, but, so)
  • comma usage guidelines
  • figurative language
  • morphology -ment suffix
• A GIST summarising exercise, guiding students to distill the text into a concise 20-word summary, enhancing comprehension and retention. A sequence text structure graphic organiser for analyzing the text’s organization.
• Explicit vocabulary instruction with definitions, examples, and semantic activities like synonyms and antonyms exploration.
• Critical thinking prompts to encourage deeper analysis and discussion.
• Activities focused on comprehension, summarizing, and using textual evidence to make inferences.

Resource Benefits:

• Fosters active learning and student engagement through a blend of reading, discussion, and critical analysis.
• Designed to expand vocabulary and refine comprehension strategies, making it suitable for a diverse range of learners, including those needing extra support.
• Aids students in connecting the text with their own experiences, enriching their understanding.

This resource empowers students to:

• Monitor and confirm comprehension through annotation, rereading, questioning, answering, and visualization.
• Summarise and draw conclusions, identifying key details that support the text’s central message.
• Make inferences using explicit and implicit information, drawing on prior knowledge.
• Analyse text structure and the purposeful use of language.
• Think critically about a text by examining perspectives and making connections.