Code Girls by Liza Mundy tells the story of the female codebreakers during World War II. It focuses on the experiences of employed women during the war and how they solved countless codes which was crucial at the time.

Although I don’t really enjoy reading nonfiction texts, Code Girls was very engaging since it talks about the war from the perspective of female codebreakers. This nonfiction book is during a time period where women was treated unequally and was not encouraged to work. In Code Girls, it talks about the challenges women faces, not only from society but also from the war.

Below is some notes I took on Code Girls this unit.

The page above is a central idea I found at the beginning of Code Girls, which was that women during World War II was not appreciated enough.

At first I used a table layout to organize my notes, but I found that to be messy since I kept adding more evidence. So I rewrote it in a mind map layout, which makes it easier to see all the points.

Although there was many evidence of women not being appreciated enough in this in the book, I chose three main ones that I think really shows the point. The central idea was talked about throughout the whole story, majority of the code breakers were women, because men had to work overseas. However, after the war ended, the only ones that was celebrated was men.

I included reasoning in green to show how I thought about the quote and how it is connected to the central idea.

This is another note book page about a central idea I found in the book. It is that women can do just as well as men, which is pretty similar to the first central idea that I found. This time, instead of writing how women was not treated equally, most of the evidence is about the accomplishments they had made. I chose to write this in a table layout, including evidence and thoughts.

This page above was a preparation on a debate we did in class. Our book club decided on the claim of women were essential to America’s victory in World War II. I found two evidence talking about how women accomplishments were so useful that they began to be needed in other places. I color coded the evidence and reasons to show which reasoning is about which evidence.

This page was to write a social issue and then find evidence throughout the book to make connections. The two issues I chose was sexism and isolation, Code Girls talks a lot about how women was treated unequally. It also talks about their works, and as code breakers, they couldn’t tell people what work they had, therefore many people didn’t understand them. For this page, I color coded them in order for it to not get mixed up, I also included arrows to explain the evidence.

In this mini-lesson, we talked about the cause and effects in a book. I used a mind map format to easily show the main points. We first practiced this on a video from Hidden Figures, and together we found out the causes and effect of it. For my mind map on Code Girls, I used World War II as my cause and added several effects of it. World War II gave a lot of opportunities for women so I mostly focused on how it changed society’s perspective toward them.

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Overall, I enjoyed reading this book and discussing it with my book club. I would recommend it to people who people who wants to learn more about World War II!