Activity

Begin the lesson by watching Leaving home asking students to make a mental note of four things that they learn during the course of the extract.

Hear a selection of the class' ideas before drawing out any other snippets of information that the extract revealed. For example:

• WWII has started and this triggers an evacuation
• Children are evacuated, not adults
• Danny and Neville attend a Jewish school
• Some children are not being evacuated
• They all have to have gas masks and get given some rations
• The school is used as the means of organising evacuation
• They are going to Blackpool
• Children will be placed with families to look after them

Round this off by asking students to answer the following questions:

1. Why do you think children were evacuated during WWII?
2. Which different groups of people did evacuation effect?
3. In what different ways do they think evacuation might have affected people within these groups?

This can lead into a broader introduction to the policy of evacuation - the motivation behind it and some more detail about who, where and why.

Some more ideas

• Why not use the extract as the basis for a short writing exercise - imagining the feelings of one of the children being evacuated in this sequence.