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Activities for Community Groups: Children and Young People

These activities are designed to be introduced by youth workers and other leaders of children's and young people's groups. They can be used as part of learning activities, drama presentations and community work.

These activities draw on story extracts from the Archive. Story extract titles appear in bold in the activities below, eg A Child Remembers the Outbreak of War. These extracts can be found on the Story Extracts page.

Evacuation

Activity 1

Give each young person a label. Ask them to write their name and address on it, and tie the label to a piece of string which they hang around their neck. Ask them to say how they feel about having a label around their neck. Do they feel happy or sad? Would they be afraid if they were in strange surroundings?

Split them into groups of three or four. Ask them to read the extracts York and Canada: Memories of an Evacuee, A Surrey Boy's War; Evacuation to South Africa and The Atlantic Divide: Evacuated to America on the Story Extracts page.

Now ask them to write down or highlight the words that indicate how the children felt about leaving for evacuation. Ask each group to imagine they are one of the children being evacuated, and then to imagine they are doing a video diary entry about how they feel the night before they leave home. Each group can then act out their diary entry to the rest of the group.

Activity 2

Ask the group to stand and line up in pairs. Tell them to imagine that they are children being evacuated, and that the other person in the pair is a brother/sister/cousin. Tell them that they have just walked into a village hall ready to be allocated the homes where they will stay during evacuation. The group leader and, if possible, other adults should walk around the room and select four of the young people to stand in the four corners of the room. Tell them that each corner represents a different household in the area where they have been evacuated. While selecting the young people the adults could make comments like, 'You go to that house because they need strong boys/girls to work on the farm'. However, you must know your group very well to ensure that the adults do not reinforce any misconceptions the young people have about their self image, as you do not want to damage self esteem. You may need to choose two people at a time for the different corners, with one of them playing a 'carer' role. Once the young people are standing in the four corners, ask them to stay in role and answer questions about how the selection experience made them feel.

You could get the whole group to perform the activity described in the task sheet below, and then show it to the parents and other members of the community as part of a record of local history. You will have to adapt the scope of this project depending upon resources available and the age of the young people.

Bombing

Activity 3

Make two copies of each of the stories Plane Crash in an Essex Cornfield, Collecting Shrapnel - and Bombs - in Wartime London and A Night to Remember: The Coventry Blitz. These extracts can be found on the Story Extracts page.

Split the young people into six groups, and give each group a story. Ask three groups to prepare a role-play from the point of view of the adults in the stories, and three groups to prepare a role-play from the point of view of the children. Tell them to pick out quotations from the stories to use. They could then perform their role-plays.

Rationing

Activity 4

Take a Mars bar or chocolate bar and cut it into very small pieces. As it is handed around the group, ask the young people to explain why it has been cut up so small. Ask them if they can link it to a historical period and why.

Now ask your group to read some of the following extracts on the Story Extracts page: Emergency Cream and Soya Marzipan: Christmas Cakes in 1943, The Black Banana, A 3-Year-Old's Recollection, Strange Things on the Dinner Table, The Birthday Party, Caught: Memories of a Mars Bar and A Child's View of War: Disney Gas Masks and Saving Sugar.

Ask the young people to plan a menu for a children's party during World War Two, based on what they have just read. You can do this as a whole group or in small groups.

For ideas and further research there are many other examples in the Rationing category on the WW2 People's War website. Once the menus have been decided upon, the group could organise a party and reproduce the wartime food for elderly members of the local community or local children. At the party they could also produce role plays about the period, perform relevant songs and play wartime games.

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