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Online Activities
Suggestions for follow up activities:
Rationing Challenge:
An interactive activity where pupils can go on a shopping expedition, to discover how rationing worked, which foods were rationed, and which were unavailable during World War 2.
- Project onto the interactive whiteboard, use as an introduction to work on food rationing.
- Children make their own contemporary menus, and work out wartime equivalents.
- Vera's favourite wartime recipes could be made as part of a DT project, and shared with other classes.
- Experienced players of the Rationing challenge could devise a scoring system, and test one another's knowledge of rationed items.
Extension:
- Pupils use the challenge to research food rationing in more detail, using the letters in the Research Room to find clues.
A Wartime Home:
Children take a virtual tour of a model house - an exact copy of a real family's wartime home. By moving the mouse around, and clicking on the 'hot links', they can find out about objects in each room.
- Pairs could be challenged to make comparisons between individual rooms and their modern counterparts. What, for example, is the modern equivalent of the scullery?
- What differences are there between the child's bedroom and their own? Ask them to make comparative sketches.
- Children identify features which are wartime additions, and discover their purpose.
- Cross curricular links could be made by using a shared writing session to compose a story set in the house, and creating the characters who lived there. All wartime details must be correct.
Evacuees' Letters:
Use this section to help pupils understand the importance of primary sources.
- Ask children to imagine that they are Delia, and to respond to a letter of their choice.
- Challenge Pupils to devise a role play, in which Clifford, (Delia's brother) arrives home from the country. What are his reactions? Who and what is he most pleased to see? What stories might he tell?
- Other letters may form a suitable basis for drama, particularly those about air raids.
- Compile a list of questions to guide children's reading of this section.
How did rationing affect home life?
What were parent’s main concerns about their children who had been evacuated?
Using Sources
Being an historian is like being a detective. Historical sources are
the clues to fitting a story together.
- Encourage your pupils to ask
questions about each of the sources you use:
What
is it?
Who wrote/made/took it?
Why was it written/made/taken?
What is it for?
How is/was it used?
What does this source tell you?
What doesn't it tell you?
- Using any of these sources, ask your pupils to suggest other questions that they
would like to know the answers to.
They could record the results of
their investigations on a chart like this:
Looking At Sources:
| WHAT
IS IT? |
THINGS
I FOUND OUT FROM THIS SOURCE |
WHAT
ELSE I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW |
| Photograph
of a gas mask |
1.
It was made for young children
2. People thought they looked like Mickey Mouse |
1.
What was it made of?
2. How did it feel to wear it? |
| Poster |
That
the government wanted all children to stay in the countryside |
How
many children lived in Britain's cities during the war? |
Finding Out More:
- Real sources can be found all over the place:
Local buildings,
war memorials,
at the local library,
record office
museum
even in the school itself.
- For example, one of the best sources for finding out about wartime evacuation
is old school registers. They can tell us how many evacuees entered
country schools, how long they stayed for and how often they actually
went to school. Use your current class register, or an older one if
your school still has them, to find out how much information you can
uncover from them.
- Families usually keep lots of records and objects from the past. Even
the most ordinary things contain a lot of information.
- Pupils could add a fourth column to their 'Looking At Sources'
chart:
'Where I could find more information'.
| WHAT
IS IT? |
THINGS
I FOUND OUT |
WHAT
ELSE I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW |
WHERE
I COULD FIND MORE INFORMATION |
| Poster |
That
the government wanted all children to stay in the countryside |
How
many children lived in Britain's cities during the war? |
Record
office |
Ask pupils to bring in records or objects from home.
- Divide them into groups,
giving each group a selection of objects or documents that they have
no connection with.
- By asking investigative questions,
the group work out who the objects or documents belong to.
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