In Year 6 this term, our learning theme has been Keep Calm and Carry On: The Children’s War. We have been learning about what it would have been like to be a child during WW2. We have made gas masks and boxes, and listened to Neville Chamberlain’s speech to announce the outbreak of war. In our classrooms we have Anderson shelters, so that we can be safe when we here the air raid siren.
In literacy, we have been writing autobiographies linked to ‘Goodnight Mr Tom’. We watched the DVD, and imagined how awful it must have been for William Beech to be evacuated. We have written postcards and diary entries.
We have also learnt about Make Do and Mend. During the war, it wasn’t easy to get hold of items such as clothes and material. So people had to sew and knit so that clothes could be reused, repaired or even remade. We have learnt how to do back stitch, blanket stitch and how to sew on a button. The biggest challenge has been learning how to knit, because at the start, not many of us could do this. However we have persevered and we are now hoping to make squares which we can sew together to make a blanket.
At the end of term, we went to London. We had a fabulous time and were really impressed with The London Eye. Although it was a bit scary, it was amazing how far we could see over the city. The people on the ground below looked like tiny ants! We also visited The Imperial War Museum, to look at an exhibition called ‘The Children’s War’. We saw different accounts of what the war was like for children, and looked around a typical home during the war years.
