Lesson video

Hello, Year Six, and welcome back.

This is History.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson, and we're learning all about 20th century conflict.

This is Lesson Seven.

Can you believe it? If you haven't watched these lessons so far, go back to the website and catch up on the first six lessons because for the rest of us, oh my gosh, at the start of this, we might not have known anything about all of the wars that took place during the 20th century.

Now we know there is this militarism and alliances and imperialism and countries teaming up each other and going to the huge scale wars and then deals made and Hitler rising.

So much has happened! In today's lesson, we're going to be doing something a little bit different, something that you might not have done before.

We're going to be writing an essay and I'm going to explain exactly what that means and how to do it.

We're going to write an essay about the First and Second World War.

"What is an essay?" I hear you ask.

Good question.

Don't worry.

We're going to find out all about it, but by the time this week has finished, you're going to have a really, really long piece of writing that shows just what expert you are in this topic.

It's going to be really satisfying.

It's going to be a chance to get down everything that you've learned, bring it all back together, make sure it's organised well in your brain, and just show just how much you know about this subject.

Okay? It's going to be really cool.

So the first, let's have a look at what our lesson looks like.

The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to just recap our knowledge organiser.

You might remember I showed you that right at the start, all of those key facts that sort of come together represent everything we need to know about the topic.

Well, not everything we need to know, but the minimum that we need to know about the topic.

So we're going to revisit the knowledge organiser.

Then I'm going to explain this bit about what an essay actually is.

Then we're going to plan one, two, three paragraphs Today, we're going to be writing three paragraphs, okay? Today, three paragraphs, in the next lesson three paragraphs, altogether we're going to have an essay that's about six paragraphs with an introduction and conclusion.

So it's going to be about six paragraphs, probably about two pages.

Some of you might write three pages.

If you are somebody who is just amazing at this topic then you may well even write four or five pages, okay? So first of all, revisiting our knowledge organiser.

Pause the video for a moment, have a look back at that knowledge organiser because there's so much on there.

So pause the video and take a moment just to remind yourself of all of that key vocabulary and the key facts.

Okay, great.

Hopefully you've had a chance to look at that.

Now, one of the things that you can do with that knowledge organiser is you can use it to make some flashcards.

And I spoke a little bit about this before, but I didn't really explain what I meant by that.

So I'm going to show you now exactly how to it.

Now to make great flashcards, what you need to do is you need to look at just one section, 'cause it's too much altogether.

So you just look at one section.

So you could look at the timeline, and you probably wouldn't even do the whole timeline.

You'd probably just do a little chunk of the timeline and make some flashcards all about that.

So I'm looking at this timeline.

I'm just looking at the first fact, number one.

And it says that in 1871, after defeating fronts in the Franco-Prussian War, Germany unites into a great empire.

I remember that was when von Bismarck joined all of Prussia and the German-speaking people all together.

They had a big war with France, which brought them all back together and made Prussia into this great empire, one of the things that started the First World War.

So I might want to make that into a flashcard.

Now I'll show you exactly how I do that.

So I've just got here.

It's just some old Post-it notes.

And what I would do is on one side of this, so I've got literal Post-it notes.

It doesn't have to be fancy.

And on one side, I just write down, looking back at the knowledge organiser, it says 1871 here.

So I'll write 1871 on one side of the flashcard.

And then on the other side, what I need to do is I need to use my knowledge organiser to write down what happens.

So we go back to the knowledge organiser, after defeating fronts in the Franco-Prussian war, Germany unites into a great empire.

That's what I need to write down.

After defeating fronts in the Franco Prussian War, Germany unites into a great empire.

Okay, done! That was one flashcard done.

I've got it! On one side, 1871, and on the other side, after defeating France in the Franco-Prussian War, Germany unites into a great empire.

Now, why is that helpful, having a flashcard like that? Well, it's helpful because now what I can do with our flashcard is I can have them in a pile and have them maybe on my bedside table or on my desk or in the kitchen, and every time I pass them, I'm just going to pick it up.

And I'm going to look at one side, and if the sides is 1871, I need to see if I can remember, retrieve, recall from my head, remember what happened in 1871.

What happened in 1871? Can I remember that? I don't just peek straight away.

That wouldn't help me to remember.

I'm not just reading it.

I try and remember.

And I might look at it and say, what happened at 1871? That was when Prussia united.

That's when von Bismarck united Prussia.

And then I check.

I check on the other side, after defeating France in the Franco-Prussian war, yes, I got that right.

Well done.

I got that one right.

And every time you try and remember it, even if you're not correct, every time you try and remember it and check it, it will just lock that knowledge in your brain a little bit more so that when somebody mentions 1871 to you, you'll say, hmm, that's the year that Germany united.

That's the year that von Bismarck united Prussia and the German-speaking people.

And it'll be in your head forever like that, which is going to be really helpful.

So I put a copy of the knowledge organiser as a worksheet on the next activity.

So you can download it if you're lucky enough to have a printer or if you can download it onto your computer, then you can download the knowledge organiser.

Or you can just pause the video now so that you can start to make your first few flashcards.

Great.

Well done.

Keep those up.

We don't want to do is amazing unit together, learn all this stuff, then forget it in six months.

So keep making those flashcards so that you can continuously remind yourself.

Remember this stuff forever.

Next let's move on.

Loads to do today.

Right.

So we're writing an essay.

Well, what is an essay? We're writing an essay today about everything we've learned.

What is an essay? Here's an essay from one of the children at my school.

It one of our year five children and you can see that they started writing an essay.

They were writing about Buddhism here.

So an essay is just an extended piece of writing that's all about one topic.

It's not a story.

It's a nonfiction piece of writing.

It's not a story.

It's an information piece of writing.

And it's just focused on one topic.

And you can write an essay about anything.

You could write an essay about the Romans.

You could write it about climate change.

You could write it about Christianity.

What else do you think you could write an essay about? One topic, what could you write it about? Those are different ideas.

Yeah.

Yeah, as long as it's about one topic, and it's an information texts, you can write an essay about it.

Really good essays, though, really good essays, they make an argument.

So they explain the topic that they're writing about really, really well.

And they persuade the reader to agree with you.

So if you're writing an essay about the Romans, and you're saying, "The Romans were amazing.

They were the greatest civilization ever," then the best essays will persuade the reader that you are right.

Knowledge is power.

The more you know about something, the more persuasive you are, the more you can get people to agree with you.

That's what an essay is doing.

Here's what your essay is going to be.

I'll let you read that at the top.

So I've got a statement there.

The Treaty of Versailles was responsible for the Second World War.

The Treaty of Versailles was responsible for the Second World War.

Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that statement? To what extent you agree with that? How far do you agree with that? Do you think, "Yeah, that's about right.

The Treaty of Versailles was responsible for the Second World War"? Or do you think, "Mm, I'm not so sure about that.

I think there were other things"? Well, for us to be able to answer this, we're going to have to plan.

We're going to have to plan our essay.

And to plan, we're going to box up our plan like this.

We're writing three paragraphs today, one, two, three.

In our plan, we're going to put down some key information to remind ourselves of all the things that we can write about.

I'm also going to put some key vocabulary here.

Key information to remind us about what to write about, key vocabulary to make sure it's an excellent non-fiction essay.

Now, each of these paragraphs is really just about one of the lessons that we've done.

So you should have loads to write about because in each of those lessons, you wrote pages and pages.

In the essay, you're just going to write one paragraph about each lesson.

Now, if you really want to, you could write more paragraphs about each one and make your essay even longer and better, but you can also just write one paragraph.

So you should have plenty to write about.

In our first paragraph, we're going to think about what caused the First World War to break out.

For us to answer this question, the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for the Second World War, we'll have to discuss the First World War.

We'll have to discuss about how awful the First World War was.

So that will take us back to our lesson about why so many lives were lost in the Western front.

And finally we'll then go into explaining the Treaty of Versailles.

That's our three paragraphs for today.

We're going to plan those together.

And then you're going to have a chance to write them.

In our next lesson, we'll do three more paragraphs, which will finish our essay.

So the first thing I'd like you to do is I'd like you to draw out that plan.

The way that we do that is it's going to look something like this on your page.

You're going to have three columns.

You're going to have Key Information as the sort of largest column.

I'd count about eight to 10 lines to give you plenty of space.

I'm just going to show you how to do that.

In fact, I'll show you one time.

So if I go back to my little modelling station here, so the first thing I need to write down is that the first column, which was Key Information.

So I just wrote that at the top.

And then the second column, what was the second column? Key vocabulary, my key words.

That's right, key vocabulary.

And then I'm just going to use my ruler.

I want my Key Information to be a bit bigger.

I'm going to use my ruler to draw a nice straight line.

If you don't have a ruler, you could use a book or something like that just to make sure you've got a nice straight line, and I've got my margin here.

So I'll just use that in my other column, and the first paragraph, let's give ourselves about eight to 10 lines.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.

Yep, that'll do about there.

Ruler again, nice straight line.

Try and keep this neat and organised.

And I'll just write paragraph one here.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.

Paragraph two.

And this is going to allow me to plan my essay.

So I've got loads to write, and it's going to be really easy to get writing on my essay.

So have a go at that now.

Pause this and see if you can drop your, make your plan ready on your page.

Okay, great.

You should have that by now.

So now that we've got our plan ready, it's time to start planning.

This is what we're going to do: In the Key Information box, you're going to either draw pictures or jot down words to remind you of all of the things that you want to write about.

The Key Vocabulary is the technical vocabulary, the key words that you need to include to show that you really know this topic well, okay? So I'm going to, if you want to, you might be ready to go.

You might be thinking, yeah, I know loads about this.

I remember Lesson One all about the start of the First World War.

I can plan this straight away.

If you're ready to go, you can pause, and you can start planning now.

If you want to, you can watch me, and I'll show you how I would do this first box just so you can get an idea of what planning looks like.

So the paragraph says what caused the First World War to break out? I might go back to my notes just to remind me of that first lesson.

And then I'm going to go to my planning sheet and see if I can remember what caused the First World War to break out.

Well, I remember, one of the things I remember is that there was those MAIN, I'll write it here in fact, 'cause those were some of the key factors, weren't they? The MAIN factors, and that was militarism, militar, militarism.

Oh, I've made a mistake, nevermind.

Militarism, make sure your spelling is perfect, militarism.

So A was alliances.

I was imperialism.

N was nationalism.

So that's some of the vocabulary that I'll want to include in that first paragraph.

What else happened to start the First World War? I remember there was, of course, driving in his car, there was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and he and his wife were shot by Gavrilo Princip.

So they don't have to be great pictures.

It's just to remind you of what happened.

I'm just going to put Archduke Franz Ferdinand, AFF.

That was one of the things.

What else? Oh, I remember, there was the unification of Germany.

So von Bismarck had like one of those hats with that sort of spike at the top.

So I'll draw it like that.

So that's von Bismarck, and he had that big moustache as well.

So I'll draw a moustache.

So von Bismarck, he unified Germany.

So I'll just quickly draw a sort of sketch of Europe here.

And there was sort of Prussia, also known as Germany, later known as Germany, and von Bismarck united Prussia and Germany and all of those people.

And that made France very upset and worried, especially because there was the Franco-Prussian war.

So I'm just jotting pictures that will help to remind me to write about, oh, and also of course, all of these countries were really, they were really arming in terms of militarism.

They were getting lots of guns and things.

They were increasing their weapon technology and weaponry and building up that armies.

So I've got lots of information that's going to help me to write.

I'd like you to have a go now, pausing the video and seeing if you can jot down in your plan everything that you want to write about in that first paragraph, about why the First World War broke out.

Pause the video now and fill that in.

Great.

So I'm going to put it a few ideas down here for you just in case you missed them.

So you might've put the MAIN factors, militarism, alliances, imperialism, and nationalism.

You might've mentioned, that's von Bismarck there.

You might have mentioned Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

You could have sketch pictures of each of those, or you might have just written down in words who they were.

You put might put down MAIN, that these were different factors.

Remember that word.

A factor is something, an event that leads to something else happening.

So anything that leads to something else happening is a factor that we need to take into account.

So you might say that these were all the factors, militarism, alliances, and the fact that all these things were happening, they're factors.

You might talk about from von Bismarck.

Make sure you spell his name correctly, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Make sure you spell his name correctly.

That's going to give us plenty to write about in that first paragraph.

If you've got those ideas down, you're going to have loads to write about 'cause each of those ideas can turn into a sentence or two, and you've got a nice big paragraph, maybe even two or three paragraph.

You might want to talk about how the First World War was sort of like a chain reaction.

Once one country declared war on another country, they were all declaring war on each other.

Great! Paragraph two, why were so many lives lost on the Western front? This is our second lesson where we talked all about how awful the First World War was.

Pause the video and see if you can fill in the key information boxes there and the key vocabulary.

After you've finished, I'll show you what I put in mine.

Awesome! Hopefully you filled out that box by now.

So what we're going to do, so what I would include here is I might include how there is that all that new advanced weaponry, especially the machine gun, so much, much more sophisticated weapons in the First World War.

It's one of the reasons so many more people died.

That weaponry meant that people had to live in trenches or that they had to fight in trenches.

They couldn't just stand on a battlefield and go into normal battle where they're sort of like fighting each other hand-to-hand.

They had to dig down so they didn't get mowed down by the machine guns.

There was that awful Battle of the Somme.

Lots of other battles as well, but the Battle of the Somme particularly bloody.

And you might remember that 40 million people were killed or injured.

And so you might've sketched the Vickers machine gun there, the people in trenches.

You might have sketched some other things as well.

So that's what we're going to write about in paragraph two.

And we'll have loads of writes about there.

Paragraph three is going to ask you about the Treaty of Versailles.

In paragraph three, this is where we write about the Treaty of Versailles.

Now we know what led up to the First World War, that the First World War was so horrible.

We'll talk about the Treaty of Versailles.

So what would you draw or sketch down? What will you write about in this paragraph here? Pause the video, and fill in your box for paragraph three.

Awesome.

So again, I'm going to share with you some of the things that I thought I would write about, remembering what I can from that lesson.

I think that I would put down about the big three, so Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson, and David Lloyd George there.

Clemenceau on the left with that big moustache, Woodrow Wilson in the middle here, and David Lloyd George on the right.

So I'd write down about the big three.

I might write down about Article 231, that War Guilt Article that the Germans hated so much, the one that said the entire war was Germany's fault.

I might write about reparations, the money that Germany had to pay and how Woodrow Wilson wanted the League of Nations to be created.

And it was created this League of Nations, this club, this group of countries to try and stop war happening again.

And I may talk about how the Germans hated the Treaty of Versailles that they called it, the Diktat of Versailles.

Like a dictator, they've just been told what to do.

They didn't get any say in it, and it was really embarrassing for them.

So once you've done that, you might want to pause the video and just add to your notes, if you missed any of that now.

So pause the video and add to your notes if you missed anything.

Great! Hopefully you've got a really, really super plan now.

All together, it might look something like this.

You've got all of these ideas together, and you've got plenty to write about.

You know exactly what you're going to writing about in each paragraph.

If you want to go further, that would be really impressive.

I know that some of you are like, "Don't stop me.

I'm going to absolutely smash this." That's absolutely fine as well, but minimum one paragraph on each of those boxes.

And before we start an essay, we often just give it an introduction just to introduce people as to what's going to be talked about, very briefly.

Don't go into a lot of detail, just so that people get an idea of what the whole essay is about.

These are quite difficult to write.

I'm going to give you a few examples.

If you'd like to, you can just copy these down, or you can use some of the ideas to make your own introduction.

So I might write down from my introduction: Writing during the First World War, H.

G.

Wells declared that it was the war to end all war.

Yet, only 21 years later, millions more lives were lost in another major international war.

Some argue that the Treaty of Versailles meant the Second World War was inevitable.

However, other factors must be considered.

So I'm talking about the two different wars because that's what my essay is going to be about.

I'm answering the question.

My question says the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for the Second World War.

To what extent do you agree? So I've said some people argue that it was the Treaty of Versailles, but there were other factors.

So my answer there is the Treaty of Versailles did contribute, but all of the other factors need to be considered as well because they all interacted with each other.

Here's another example.

You can write different kinds of introductions.

Here's another example that you might put: Although the Treaty of Versailles, answering the question.

Remember, that's the question.

Was it the treaty of Versailles? Although the Treaty of Versailles could be considered to be the cause of the Second World War, this is too simplistic.

There were lots of other factors which all worked together to trigger the Second World War, including Hitler's foreign policy aims, the policy of appeasement, along with the Treaty of Versailles.

So I'm just giving you a bit of a taste, a flavour of what's going to come, what I'm going to write about later on in the essay.

So pause the video now and write down your introduction using some of the ideas there.

Or if you already have an introduction in your head, you can write your own one down.

Pause the video and write your introduction.

Super! So we're pretty much ready to go.

We are pretty much ready to go.

Here are some tips to remind you of what you should be doing.

You should be writing in full sentences.

You should be including the key information and key vocabulary, and you might like to tick it off your plan.

For every new paragraph you start, leave a blank line.

And a good sort of tip here for writing good essays, imagine you're explaining it to somebody that doesn't really know anything about the topic.

Maybe you're explaining it to a younger sibling or somebody else in your class who hasn't studied this.

Imagine explaining it to them.

That's how you should write, okay? I'm just going to show you how I would do the first paragraph.

In case you were thinking, "I don't really know how to make this plan into an essay," let me show you.

So I've got my plan here and this first paragraph of notes is going to turn into my first paragraph.

So I'm going to write about how the First World War happened.

And I might, first of all, talk about von Bismarck because that happened first.

So I'm going to talk about von Bismarck.

In my first paragraph, I'll say: In 1871, Otto von Bismarck unified Germany.

This meant that Prussia.

I'm just going to put Germany in brackets.

Prussia and Germany refers to the same thing here.

Became a huge and powerful empire.

Getting back to my plan, so I've talked about von Bismarck.

I'll tick him off.

Oh, imperialism.

That's right.

I could talk about and imperialism here because that's what Prussia were doing.

They were being imperialistic and trying to take other countries.

So in 1871, von Bismarck unified Germany.

This meant the Prussia, Germany, became a huge and powerful empire.

Many nations in Europe at this time were imperialistic, and so were concerned with how powerful Germany was becoming.

Now that then makes me think straight away how that led, so imperialism done, but that led to the alliances because France then made a deal with Russia, didn't they? So I've talked about unification.

France then made a deal with Russia.

Those were the alliances.

This led, so you can see it as I'm using my notes, it's giving me ideas of what to write.

And when you write one sentence, it tends to jog your memory and make your brain make connections.

This led to France making an alliance or deal with Russia.

We talked about alliances.

What else can I talk about? They were all arming, weren't they? There's our arming.

On top of this, many European nations were building up their armies and investing in new deadly weapons.

So I've talked a little about militarism there as well.

I still need to talk about nationalism.

You can see, and I need to talk about Archduke Franz Ferdinand as well.

You can see that just by using those notes and turning them into four sentences, I've already got so much writing down, and I haven't even finished writing about that first paragraph.

So have a go now yourself, writing down your first paragraph and using your notes.

If you know some extra research, 'cause you've done some extra research that you want to include about the start of the sort of First World War, the buildup to the First World War, you can absolutely include that as well.

Take this as far as you want to go with it.

Have a go now writing your first three paragraphs using your planning sheet, and I can't wait to see what you come up with.

Pause the video and do that now.

Super! Well done! I'm sure that you were working really hard there and that in front of you, you've got a really long piece of writing.

And you can look at that and you can go, "Wow, I'm proud of myself.

I'm a real expert on this topic now.

I'm a real expert on the First World War, on the state of Europe in the 19th century and the early 20th century, and I'm starting to gain a picture of why these conflicts happened and a little bit about why the world is like it is now, why the countries are like they are like now." I'd love to see some of that work.

I'd love for you to send it in.

So please do ask your parents to share on Twitter pictures of your essays.

I'd like to read them.

You can do that by tweeting @OakNational, #LearnWithOak, #ONAYear6.

You need to ask you a parent or carer to do that.

And if you do that, I'll be able see it, and I will read it.

Thank you very much.

I will see you next lesson where we're going to do the final three paragraphs to make your essay even more impressive.

Well done, everybody.

See you next time!.