We have been on many roads and on this journey for a very long time. We finished reading ‘Journey to Jo’burg’ before christmas and still doing the same unit, but the unit started before that. We did a lot of things like we made magazine articles, watched Invictus, Shane came and talked about apartheid and rewrote ‘Time of fire’. The unit question was What are the relationships between texts and the real world but at this case it is What are the relationships between Journey to Jo’burg and the real world (apartheid). If you think about it, there is lots of relationships with books and he real world, even fiction books.
The first road we had to go through was to read Journey to Jo’burg. It wasn’t that hard. Journey to Jo’burg is a story based on during apartheid. Its about two kids Naledi and Tiro walking 300 kilometers to get to there mother so that their mother can get Naledi’s baby sister, Dinero to a doctor. What I learnt from the this book was that the characters in this book might not be true but that some of the events that happened in this book, happened in apartheid.
The second road was a bit harder to go through. We had four people in each table and we each chose 1 topic out of four to make a magazine article. The topics were Soweto Uprising, Nelson Mandela, South Africa and Apartheid. I chose the topic Nelson Mandela. So all the people who chose the topic Nelson Mandela got into a group. I heard of the name Nelson Mandela but I didn’t know a lot about him. We did some research about him and we all each made an magazine article. This is my Magazine Article. I learnt that Nelson Mandela was in Jail for 27 years and then became the president of South Africa.
This road was the easiest to go through. We watched the movie Invictus, it was a good movie. The movie was about how Nelson Mandela got the white people and black people together and stopped apartheid. Even though I was researching about him, I found out more about how Nelson Mandela stopped apartheid.
After that Mr.Fedley’s friend Shane, visited school and talked about apartheid. Shane was born/grew during apartheid in South Africa and saw apartheid from a different perspective since he grew up as a white. He told that he didn’t know apartheid was happening when he was young since the media was very strict and Afrikaan people lived very far away from him. What I learnt that was surprising was that some Afrikaan people liked apartheid. Just by reading Journey to Jo’burg I thought that every Afrikaan people hated apartheid but I was wrong some people liked it.
Then we rewrote ‘Time of fire’ (Chapter 11 of Journey to Jo’burg). We rewrote using our knowledge on the book and the apartheid, made it more detailed and put more feeling into it, but there was one problem, it had to be present tense. Which was very hard for me. Before everyone handed in their work, everyone got checked each other for mistakes or feedback. When people were checking mine, they found so many mistakes and 90% was that the words/sentences were PAST TENSE. It was a challenging work for me.
The Journey has almost come to an end, this unit has made to think about more about past on apartheid and the connection between the books that I read and the real world. I think I got better at writing in present tense but I know that I learnt a lot in this unit.
