Year 6 History: Investigating WWII Evacuee Artefacts

Year 6 had a fascinating afternoon investigating a small suitcase, which had been mysteriously delivered to our classroom.  After examining it closely to work out how old it might be, who it might have belonged to and when it might have been used, we took a look inside...

The suitcase had belonged to a child living during World War II, and was used by that child when he or she was evacuated to the countryside in either 1939 or 1940.  Inside the case, we found essential items such as a child's gas mask, an identity card, a ration book, some coins (which had the head of King George VI on them - he was the monarch at that time), a luggage tag and two toys that wartime children would have been familiar with (a wooden yo-yo and a bag of glass marbles).

From these artefacts we were able to draw some conclusions about what the lives of evacuated children might have been like.