The Walking With An Anzac Tumblr supports New Zealand students and their teachers to tell the stories of First World War Soldiers from their local community.
Walk with an Anzac from your community. Discover their part in New Zealand’s war effort. Use the story you find to investigate concepts in social sciences, art and statistics. Share your commemoration projects with other classrooms.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.
This is the fourth stanza from Laurence Binyon’s poem 'For the Fallen'. Referred to as the Ode of Remembrance, it was first published in The Times of London in September 1914 and has been incorporated into the ritual of remembrance in many countries.
Many memorials to those killed in the First World War contain epitaphs such as ‘they liveth for evermore’ or ‘lest we forget’. How well have succeeding generations lived up to these expectations?
We know about the feats of some soldiers whose deeds were acknowledged with medals and other accolades. But little is known about the vast majority of servicemen and women whose names appear on our memorials.
Walking With An Anzac is an educational project that focuses on supporting NZ students and their teachers to actively use the online records of First World War Soldiers from their local community.
1. Start with a local memorial such as a school honours board or cenotaph, or perhaps you already know of a family member who served.
2. Select a name and either as an individual or in pairs carry out an inquiry into that person’s life.
3. Look at ex-students and use your findings to create a school database.
This site serves as both a starting point, for teachers wishing to see what other classrooms are doing, as well as a display area to showcase individual classroom projects and initiatives.
Go the Walking with an Anzac website
Teaching resources
Lessons
- What can you buy with a Dead Man's Penny? (PDF, 223 KB)
- What does a country look like when 120,000 people go to war? (PDF, 279 KB)
- What does my town and a beach in Turkey have in common? (PDF 277 KB)
- How do you measure the First World War? (PDF, 238 KB)
- If an army marches on its stomach why did we feed ours hard tack? (PDF, 240 KB)
- Why you should never believe everything you are told (PDF, 244 KB)
- Try This (PDF, 150 KB)
'What we find' fact sheets
- How to: Create an online exhibition using Historypin (PDF, 2 MB)
- How to: Uncover you school's First World War history (PDF, 9 MB)
- How to: Read historical images (PDF, 2 MB)
Fact sheets
- What We Lost (PDF, 2.1 MB)
- What We Ate (PDF, 659 KB)
- Where We Lived (PDF, 1.2 MB)
- What We Invested (PDF, 1 MB)
- Where Was It? (PDF, 1.3 MB)
- Who Was I? (PDF, 848 KB)