Why was it necessary for children to be evacuated throughout the war, and what was the experience of evacuation really like?
This question has two significant outstanding lessons to cover most of the content and to deliver important skills of asking historical questions and appreciating diversity of experience.
Before moving to these, and they are both fully explained on the site, it is worth setting the scene using slide 2 of the PowerPoint below. Can pupils work out what is going on here? It is a puzzling image but much can be deduced. The best way to encourage pupils to look deeply is to use the strategy known as zones of inference.
Learning objectives
- Pupils grasp that this would be a war in the air and that there would be vastly more civilian damage than in the First World War.
- Pupils can use a graph of the changing numbers of evacuees and a photograph to raise enquiry questions.
- Pupils can investigate and explain the reasons for fluctuating numbers being evacuated
- They realise that children’s experience of evacuation varied and can give reasons why the government’s portrayal was so positive.
- They can critique a BBC website interpretation
In the innermost zone
