At the end of last year, Year 6 spent the day at Lincolnsfield Children’s Centre as WW2 evacuees. Our English prefects, Rosa and Melina, tell us about their experience and what they learned from the day.
The group at Lincolnsfield Children’s Centre in Bushey
When we arrived, we were taken to the village hall which had been set up to look like a classroom from the 1940s. We were then each given identity cards to fill in. Our teacher was Miss Smith; she was very strict and seemed very scary – but she was only acting!
We were then divided into 3 groups and taken around the site to the various activities.
One of our favourite experiences of the day was when we had a ride in an American jeep. (During the war the site in Bushey was an American army base). The jeep took us to a re-creation of a Blitzed (bombed) building. Once inside, the air raid went off and we got a real sense of what it must have been like during an air raid.
Winding the air raid siren
We were also taken to a mock-up of a 1940’s house. Inside there was a kitchen, bedroom (complete with a Morrison shelter), a lounge, and a play room where we were able to try on period costumes and play with children’s toys and games from the war.
Dinner!
Outside there was a garden which had been set up as a Dig for Victory garden complete with vegetable patch, chicken coop and rabbit hutch. We learnt that rabbits and chickens were kept in the war to provide food – not as pets! Whilst we were outside we had to use a hand held stirrup pump to extinguish a pretend incendiary bomb which was lodged in the roof.
We had such a fantastic interactive “hands-on” day, which really helped us to understand what life was like on The Home Front during the Second World War.