Bilingual History Course - Dioramas about the Battle of the Somme in WW1

In our bilingual history course we often work on projects e.g. the Battle of the Somme and the Sinking of the Lusitania.
A little overview: The battle of Somme took place during WW1. It started on July 1st and ended on November 18th 1916. For 140 days the warring parties fought each other near the River Somme in France. German, British and French troops were involved, standing in trenches, facing each other. During this battle more than 300.000 soldiers died, more than 1 Million were injured. The Battle of  the Somme is known as one of the longest, most horrible, fatal and most remembered battles of the World War 1.
In order to illustrate this historical event, we tried to visualize this murderous battle by creating dioramas, three-dimensional  
miniature models. We used shoeboxes and painted or printed out different backgrounds which we fitted into the boxes. To make it more realistic, we added printed soldiers, planes, important background information, various props etc.

When doing projects on the Sinking of the Lusitania which was a decisive incident for the USA to enter WWI many of us opted for a  
model of the ship and others wrote newspaper articles or diary entries.The sinking of the Cunard ocean liner RMS Lusitania happened  
on Friday, 7 May 1915 as Germany waged its unrestricted submarine warfare against the United Kingdom which had started a naval blockade of Germany.

Working on these projects, we learned a lot about the first global war "The War To End All Wars" which led to the mobilization of more than 70 million military personnel, making it one of the largest wars in history with millions of casualties.

Joana Zimmermann, Mirja Meckelnborg ,9B