A New Reading Experience

A New Reading Experience What comes to mind when you hear the words, ‘WORLD WAR’? We think about loss, hatred, bloodshed, chaos and many more things. The same thing rushed to our minds when our teacher asked us about the World Wars. But the actual motive of our teacher was to present a book related to World War I. The name of the book is Our Jacko written by Michael Morpurgo.

When our teacher first asked us about war, we were a bit confused, like why is teacher asking us these questions? Then teacher introduced us to a book with the title Our Jacko . It was a totally new topic for me as I had never looked up any such book related to war, nor had my friends. So I never knew the experience of reading a book on war. It was like turning our class into a war field and traveling back in time!!

To tell you a little about the plot, it is an interesting story focused on a Tin Hat and three characters, Otto, Michael and their great-great grandfather, Jacko, who lost his life at Ypres in 1915. Brothers Otto and Michael, who are totally different, have different opinions on war. Otto, kind of loves it (war) while Michael is anti-war. They were growing with the tin hat which was probably used in a war but nobody knew its story.  Otto loved the hat and slowly and mysteriously the name Lieutenant Jack Morris i.e. Our Jacko comes up and many more family histories, stories and suspense starts building. The way they find about their great-great grandfather and WORLD WAR 1 AND YPRES AND THE WAR is way too fascinating. I am not going to explain what and how as I don’t want to reveal anything. I just want to tell you visit our school library and read this NAB i.e. Nostalgic Adventurous Book.

It had a happy ending but it filled me with a lot of emotions. Our Jacko is a beautiful, poignant book. I got quite emotional while reading this one. Trust me, I rarely get emotional while reading a book but this one really hit me hard. The story is just amazing and made a special attachment with me. Every week I would wait to read it along with the class and do some fun activities.

We really had a lot of fun while reading this book because of the interesting, fun and unique activities assigned to us by our teacher. She introduced us with different online activities for e.g. Zoom poll and quizzes on Mentimeter. We were asked to do character maps of the story, search and write new phrases which would help our vocabulary, draw main objects of the story. We were also asked to compare character maps that we had framed in the beginning and after reading the whole story. At the end we were asked to choose a character and dress up like them. This was the most interesting task which we enjoyed as our fellow mates asked a few questions related to the story to the characters.

We could have a done role play and enacted the whole story in front of the class and it would be more interesting to view. Teacher could have also assigned interested students to make an animated movie of the story.

READ MORE   STORIES FROM SCHOOL

The story is just as beautiful as it has to be. The book illustrations complement Sir Michael Morpurgo’s words flawlessly. It just made me stop and think about the people who had lived through WW1 and 2. What were the things they went through and the things they had seen, suffered, and what about those who fought in the war and their families who were left behind? I believe all need to/must/should read Our Jack in order to understand the feelings and things I have put down in the blog.

PS: Michael Morpurgo has put down every emotion so beautifully and so it is really a great book.  We highly recommend it! 

This blog was collaboratively written by Neha Pawar and Sagar Pai from Std.8 

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