“Recruiting Rosie: The Sales Pitch That Won a War”
Available at iTunes
This book uses a document-based approach to allow students to “be the historian.” To support that goal, it includes:
- Documents that students can easily interpret without pre-requisite background knowledge.
- Essential questions that are relevant to their lives.
- Support for mastery of Common Core State Standards with opportunities for students to discover, describe, compare and defend what they find.
Here’s a few suggestions for using “Recruiting Rosie” in the classroom. Please check back for updates to teaching ideas and iPad apps to integrate with your lessons.
Interpret a poster with Haiku Deck
Haiku Deck – a free presentation app for the iPad. It’s an impressive and easy to use tool for creating a knock-out presentation on the iPad – a great way for teachers and students to quickly share their ideas with the classroom and the digital world beyond. Here’s how I used Haiku Deck to interpret a WWII poster.
Remember that all the posters in my iBooks are in the public domain. Users can click on the link next to the poster to go to a digital image of the slide. Tap and save it to your iPad photo library. Repeat with other posters, then use Haiku Deck to curate a collection of posters
Fishbowl discussion group
A few volunteer students are “in the fishbowl” to debate the statement “Should women have left their WWII war jobs to make way for returning servicemen?” Other students serve as observers who track the arguments they feel were most compelling. Then the “observers” are asked to synthesize their ratings and share back their assessment with the entire group. Detailed instruction on how manage a “fishbowl” discussion here.
Close reading of your history text
The Common Core encourages students to more closely read a text (in all it’s multimedia formats) by answering three critical questions: What did it say? How did it say it? What’s it mean to me?
Ask them to do a close reading of their history text to see how the subject of women war workers is treated. Is there any mention of the “Woman Power” or any other coordinated effort to convince women to enter the workforce. If so, what elements does it discuss? How does the text treat the question of women leaving their jobs to make way for returning servicemen?
Integrating with iPad apps
There is an ever growing list of free iPad apps that can be used in the classroom. Here’s two apps to start with. Stop back for more technology integration ideas.
Skitch is a free iPad program that lets the user draw on images, screenshots and webpages. Students can tap on the links below the homefront posters and follow the link to an image that can be saved to their iPad. Then they can use Skitch to mark up the poster showing how specific elements of the poster communicate the message. Likewise students could take a quick screen shot of a video clip. [Simultaneously press the iPad’s on / off switch and the center home button. You will notice an on-screen flash. If you have sound enabled, you will hear a camera click.] Then use Skitch to comment on elements in the video.
Evernote is a free note-taking and annotating tool for the iPad. Student can add images from their iPad Photos Gallery and annotate with text, organize into notebooks, and identify with tags. They can add voice recordings to the notes, as well.
Student Evernotes can be exchanged via shared notes and notebooks with teacher-set permissions for viewing and editing. The app can also be used to create and share portfolios of student work.
Ask student to write a revised version of their text that includes content from “Recruiting Rosie” that they feel is significant. They should be able to justify their decisions.
