Teaching Primary History: Life in Britain 1930-1945 at Key Stage 2

The following Key Stage 2 history lessons have all been judged to be outstanding according to OFSTED criteria. There is a wide variety of teaching and learning activities as well as a rich array of teaching resources including PowerPoint® presentations. New lessons will be regularly added to meet the demands of the changing primary curriculum.

Outstanding Lessons

• ADDED AUGUST 2011 Extending the BBC website on Eric the evacuee  A highly engaging lesson in which pupils act as experts to extend the BBC children’s website on evacuation. But to do so they first need to role play a re-union of evacuees in which they reminisce about life during the Second World War. But was evacuation as happy as the BBC’s Eric the Evacuee suggests?  Pupils grow to understand the reasons why we have so many photos of smiling evacuees when the reality was sometimes quite different.
• Evacuation. An excellent lesson in which pupils ask questions of evacuation data as the launchpad for their enquiry
• What really happened at VE day street parties and why are they shown differently in the books?

Smart Task

• ADDED AUGUST 2011 Christmas for children on the Home Front during World War Two. This Smart Task help pupils investigate how Christmas for children changed over the course of the war.  By looking at food, decorations and presents they quickly broaden their prospective to look at the effects of rationing, blackout and the Blitz.

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Teaching Life in Britain 1930-45 to Key Stage 2.
 

Long before the introduction of the National Curriculum, this was always a popular topic.  Whilst most schools focus on the war years, a number also look at the 1930s.  The evacuation of children and the way people lived through the Blitz continues to fascinate.

As this is one of the very few areas of Key Stage 2 in which the pupils can use oral evidence (local history being the other main one) it is important that children use spoken or written testimony.  For most schools the focus for this will be evacuation as this provides an accessible vehicle for looking at different perspectives of the past. Quality literature on this topic abounds and there is a good range of movie film too.

The outstanding lessons featured here are very varied. On the one hand there is a really engaging activity known as spectrum in which pupils, actively learn about the different experiences of the war many people had.  On the other is the numeracy related enquiry which asks children to raise their own questions about evacuation based on a line graph. Why did the number suddenly go up a particular point point?  Why did they go down equally quickly.  The use of drama then helps pupils to empathise with the plight of people from the time.

The lesson on VE day in which pupils have to act as historical advisers to a film maker enables them to contrast images in books as well as contemporary testimony.  They realise the dangers of oversimplification. Not everyone's experience was the same.  For those seeking a context for developing higher-order source evaluation skills, then the lesson on propaganda is a tour de force.

Resourcing your topic

If you would like to encourage your pupils to explore interesting images from the Second World War using a Webquest, then help is at hand.  The Imperial War Museum, amongst other museums, have produced some excellent new resources and interesting approaches. Pupils can select areas of interest to investigate and can check their understanding using simple drag and drop activities. You can find the site here

This website offers you an excellent summary of the on-line materials that are being made available at lots of museums across the country.

A really interesting scheme of work has been produced by some Cambridgeshire teachers working on a transition project in history

It asks the question, Is there a myth that people in the countryside welcomed evacuees? The full scheme of work can be downloaded here.

Up next

•  Changing Britain: can you dress a set of a 1950s front room, without any anachronisms, for a new film?
• Curator's dilemma. You are setting up a new museum of Living Through the  Second World War on the Home Front. You have been given hundreds of items but can display just nine. Which will they be? Six pupils in role as people who did different jobs at the time then critically appraise the collection from their point of view.
• Was evacuation worth it? Having predicted what the possible arguments for both sides might be using their creative imaginations, pupils are introduced to a few new ideas before taking part in debate leading to persuasive writing.

If you would like to preview any of the activities from these lessons which are in preparation, simply email us and we will forward some sample material.

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