Term Four has been a busy and creative term for our English subject lesson students. Class 8 spent time looking at the layout and skillset behind crafting graphic novels. Students experimented with the layouts with comic strips to get a feel for a different way of creative story telling. Then, with inspiration from a range of graphic novels, students crafted their own characters with an antagonist and protagonist who undergo a series of changes as they progress through the story.

Students drafted story arcs with introductions, rising action, climax, falling action and a strong resolution. Then, after careful planning and consideration of the genre and tone of their ideas, some wonderful graphic novels emerged with some impressive imagery, in-depth characters and enthralling story lines. We had exciting action, combat, some rouge and comical “grannies”, fantastical worlds, mythical creatures, love stories, stories and fables of self worth and morality, and inspiring heroines and heroes. 

 
Class 9 explored the Diary of a Young Girl, written by the teenager Anne Frank as she was in hiding in Amsterdam during the Holocaust of Word War II. Anne commenced writing in her diary in 1942 on her 13th birthday, and it chronicles her experiences, inner most thoughts and feelings until she was 15 years old; even detailing D-Day in the hope it signified the end of the war. Despite this, Anne, her family and her family friends were captured and all but her father, passed in the concentration camps.  Confronting themes, motifs and symbols  were explored in regards to  Anne’s writing, which the students rose to with maturity and a strong sense of justice.  In particular, the similarities in age to the Class 9 students and 15-year-old Anne were explored in their written work. Students reflected on approaching adulthood, confronting our fears and the social relationships and introspection which being in hiding offered, compared to socialising in the broader world. The students then examined concepts of goodness and humanity philosophically in regards to the larger context of the holocaust and what these implications are in our lives today.  

In the final week, students presented a range of creative responses to the text, including;  sampling the favourite dish of Anne Frank (potato and carrot mash!),  learning about Anne’s love of cats and what happened to pets of the holocaust, some profound poetry, presentations on the annexe and the use of space in which she hid, the context of the war as a whole, music inspired by the ordeals that holocaust victims and survivors endured, beautifully symbolic embroidery, a replica of the diary, a treasure box of Anne’s possessions and fashion designs of the 1940s and portraits of the Frank family. The insights and creative responses shared by the Class 9s from this unit were moving and inspiring.  

Alisha Watkins

English & Humanities Teacher