摘要：In this classroom action research study, Ontario Grade Six curriculum expectations from Social Studies and Writing were integrated to improve student narrative writing skills and to teach content knowledge about Japanese Canadian Internment during the Second World War. Using a writing-to-learn method, students documented facts from daily content lessons along with their creative writing ideas into personal logs in order to write a historical narrative as their summative task. The logs were used by students as a resource to remember events they wanted to include in their narratives and for idea generation related to setting, characterization and plot. Through this process, students were able to extend and clarify their thinking about the literary elements integral to writing effective narratives as well as Social Studies content knowledge. In order to promote choice and make the assignment personally relevant, students could explore any character or plot avenue that interested them if their summative tasks included the main elements of a narrative and historically accurate settings, events, and beliefs of that time. Over the course of this unit, student discourse increasingly demonstrated an awareness of significant events that led to internment and an understanding of how Japanese Canadians were treated during this challenging time in history. Students raised many questions about social justice and governmental roles and responsibilities during times of crisis. In their narrative summative tasks, most students successfully created detailed, historically accurate settings in which they described what daily life was like. They created empathetic characters with a consistent point of view and a problem that was relevant to the story context. Although many of the story problems were realistic, general plot development techniques were neglected and seemed secondary to the creation of the setting.
