Caring on the Home Front - Volunteer memories from World War Two
Teachers’ centre
Introduction
Caring on the Home Front is a unique historical and social record of the period 1939-1945.
It is based on oral history interviews with Home Front volunteers who served in the Joint War Organisation, a partnership between the British Red Cross and St. John Ambulance. The unique experiences of these volunteers and their lively descriptions of their formative years engage and entertain far more than a dry record.
The Joint War Organisation provided vital medical, welfare and other support services. This website focuses on their work on the Home Front.
The website uses images from the collections of both organisations’ museums. There are also a number of video and audio clips available for you to download and use to support your teaching. You will also find a collection of other useful resources to help you bring your History and Citizenship lessons alive.
Curriculum links
Caring on the Home Front contains a wealth of resources supporting key areas of the curriculum. The four project packs cover the following areas of the curriculum:
- Citizenship teaching 12-14 yrs – the work of community-based, national and international voluntary groups, the importance of resolving conflict fairly, developing skills of participation and responsible action
- Cross Curricular teaching 7-11 years – supporting general teaching as well as some key programmes of study
- History teaching 7-11 yrs – Britain since 1930: the Blitz and evacuation, rationing, new technologies, the Second World War in the local area, the introduction of the National Health Service
- History teaching 12-14 yrs – A world study after 1900: the changing role and status of women
- PSHE teaching 7-11 yrs – volunteering, preparing to play an active role as citizens, thinking about the lives of people living in other times and places, taking responsibility, meeting and talking with people.
The stories themselves, as well as resources like the fact sheets, could be used to support many more areas of the curriculum.
Project packs
Each pack contains lesson plan suggestions, classroom activities, assignment ideas and links to resources within the site. Links to other resources produced by the British Red Cross and St. John Ambulance are included.
- Time Detectives: War and children – History Key Stage 2: suitable for 7-11 years, a local history study based on the stories featured on the website, encouraging pupils to find out what being evacuated was like, children’s responses to bombing, and comparisons with today. This pack can be used to set up a Veterans Day at school with people from the local community, in a celebration of volunteering
- History teaching 7-11 yrs
- PSHE teaching 7-11 yrs
- Changing Roles – History Key Stages 2 and 3: suitable for both 7-11 years and 12-14 years, an activity using the stories to discover how people’s roles, especially women’s, changed during the Blitz. Pupils will role-play several characters and act out a dramatic incident involving them all, before considering the relevance of ‘changing roles’ to their own lives today
- History teaching 7-11 yrs
- History teaching 12-14 yrs
- Citizenship teaching 12-14 yrs
- PSHE teaching 7-11 yrs
- Surviving the Blitz – A cross-curricular project for 7-11 years that starts by creating a ‘virtual blitz’ museum in the classroom and moves on to encourage pupils to communicate their own views on volunteering today
- History teaching 7-11 yrs
- PSHE teaching 7-11 yrs
- Other Curricula teaching 7-11 yrs
- What’s it got to do with me? – Citizenship Key Stage 3: suitable for 12-14 years, an activity using the stories to explore what active citizenship meant during the Blitz, and what it means to pupils’ lives today
- Citizenship teaching 12-14 yrs
Although the packs are aimed at specific age ranges, they can be adapted to other curriculum levels quite easily, or combined to form a single, broader, project.
Resource library
This is a unique collection of fact sheets, images, video and audio clips supporting the stories told in the website. You can use any of the material free of charge for educational purposes within your school, or in connection with school projects. You may not use them for any other purpose, or charge for them.