Create a Wartime Character

Left: Wing-Cdr Guy Gibson.
© Public Records Office (AIR 27/839)

This project combines history with art and language to personalise the issues and events relevant to life during the war.
The aim is to let children combine imagination with factual information and learn through the character they have created. Once they have a personality in mind, they are able to apply things they learn to that charcter and 'make it real'.

Project Outline

• Choose one character per group of five or six children. Steer the children towards a range of ages and sexes for their characters to maximise the learning potential.
• Choose names, hairstyles and clothes typical to the war years, encouraging children to use a variety of research resources for this.
• Create the charcters, 2-D or 3-D, preferably life-sized or larger, using whatever artistic materials are available. These make fantastic display pieces.
• Once the children have their characters in front of them the possibilities are endless.
• One way of using the characters would be to look at 'snapshots' of their lives as they would have been before war broke out, in the thick of it and then afterwards.
• Children could create diaries for their characters, recording their reactions to significant events.
• Less able children could create 'photo albums' of significant life events, drawing and labelling the photographs.
• Children could write letters from one character to another, recording their feelings as events unfold.
• Children could write 'Day in the Life' pieces, detailing the everyday problems facing particular characters.
• The project could be extended to the children's drama lessons, with the creation of role-play situations featuring their fictional character
• Instead of fictional characters the children could take Churchill, Vera Lynn or other 'real' people and look at the impact the war had on their lives