Pupils introduced to the Anzac spirit

Selwyn Ridge School's Room 3 pupils have a big interest in history and they are directing it at Gallipoli.

The Year 6 pupils have discovered a love for learning about the past and are using the From Tauranga to the Trenches: Teacher Resource Pack to foster this.

Teacher Roger Colquhoun said he and his class had been watching episodes of Horrible History, a series that focuses on all the gory parts of history.

"Our overall topic at the moment is the value of values. We've been building towards the school gala next term by looking back in history about economics and how things have worked with economics.

"From there, the children have found a love and a passion for history."

The children have learned about a range of historical events from ancient Rome to the Middle Ages and Mr Colquhoun said he thought it would be a good idea to study Gallipoli and World War I with the 100th anniversary coming up.

"Because the kids were so interested in history, I thought we would go deeper into the causes of WWI and that's led into the Gallipoli campaign."

To do this, Mr Colquhoun has used the teacher resource pack assembled by members of the WW100 committee, including Fiona Kean and Debbie McCauley, which has been sent out to primary and secondary schools throughout the Tauranga area.

One particular focus will be entering a competition to create postcards similar to those that would have been sent home by a soldier or a nurse serving in the war.

"They need a good background to be able to write from the perspective of a nurse or soldier. We've done a lot of reading on the Gallipoli campaign and we've watched some YouTube documentaries about the campaign.

"We looked at the causes of war and did some debating about the purpose of war and whether it's a good or bad thing, and we did posters about this."

The class looked at posters from the war to judge the propaganda urging soldiers to go to war.

Mr Colquhoun said he hoped to plan a class trip to the Anzac Day dawn service.

Eden Price, 9, said she had learned about how during the war posters were put up talking about victory.

"If people didn't want to go to war, they were called names like coward."

Eden was one of a group of pupils who were helping to create a field of remembrance for the school, making one cross for every Tauranga soldier who died in the war.