Pupils recall Home Front heroes and heroines for National Poetry Day
Warwickshire County Council’s Heritage Education team will be delivering a special Second World War poetry workshop at Thomas Jolyffe Primary School on Thursday 8th October, National Poetry Day.
The drama and writing workshop, delivered by Heritage Education’s own writers, Simon Startin and Jane Commane, fits with this year’s National Poetry Day theme of ‘Heroes and Heroines’, and will encourage children to find out how ordinary people on the Home Front become heroic by volunteering, taking special action or making sacrifices during the war.
Simon and Jane will be arriving with suitcases packed with costumes, artefacts from the Warwickshire Museum handling collection and some Warwickshire Record Office images and documents that tell the story of different wartime characters, from Land Girls to Air Raid Wardens, Evacuees to Home Guards.
The workshop will aim to get the children at Thomas Jolyffe Primary School to imagine themselves in the wartime era and get their writing hats on to produce some poems inspired by the stories of their different characters.
This special poetry workshop also launches the new Heritage Education World War Two day project for schools called ‘Don’t Panic!’ This new session will run at St John’s Museum, alongside Heritage Education’s popular and well-established schools projects such as Tudor Detectives and Victorian Schoolroom activities.
As part of the session, children are ‘evacuated’ to the safety of Warwick for the day and have a go at ‘Make Do and Mend’ and discover how gas masks, ration books and air-raid sirens became everyday parts of a 1940’s childhood.
These interactive hands-on session use objects and documents from Warwickshire Museum, Warwickshire Record Office and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers Museum to give children a real taste of Home Front life.
Simon Startin was awarded Time Out’s critic’s choice for the fourth year running for his adaptation of ‘The Odyssey’ for London Bubble and Jane Commane, a poet and publisher, has recently been commissioned to work with visitors to the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth to create original poems out of their observations.
Further details about Heritage Education’s diverse and creative school programme can be found at http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/heritageeducation.
Heritage Education were recently awarded the Learning Outside the Classroom Quality Mark, which means all their sessions are judged to have reached high standards of quality, safety and organisation.