Evacuee Stories

An extract from ‘Evacuee Stories’, an article I published in National Drama Magazine, Spring 2019. Volume 25: 1.

A scheme of work about World War 2

I wanted to write and share a scheme of work about the World War 2 evacuee experience. What other way can we get across the idea that the World War 2 “wasn’t history – it’s real” than through the Arts? And Drama is an ideal medium for bringing the experience to life for young people.

Session One

This session is designed to introduce the topic of World War 2 evacuees, at Key Stage 3.

Resources

• Evacuee tag and identity card – replicas are available to buy online.
• Photograph of evacuee children. These are freely available online.
• Pens and paper, and a whiteboard

Movement and voice warm up

• Start in a circle with a voice and movement warm up.
• Move into a fun and light-hearted warm up game, preferably one suggested by the group, to counterbalance the serious side of the subject.
• For example: play traffic lights. (Stop on red, go on green, freeze on amber, sit down on blue).
• You can also ask students to move around the room in different ways (space walking, ballroom dancing, tiptoeing) and freeze on your signal.
• If you do play freeze, you can come back to the game once the subject of the session is established and ask them to ‘freeze as if they are X character’, or to ‘freeze like a person in the photograph.’

Activities

1. Show students an evacuee tag and identity Ask open questions about it – who did it belong to? How old is it?
2. Take a look at a photograph of evacuee children leaving one of the big cities. Ask students to imagine what the people in the photograph are thinking and make some suggestions. Do this in pairs first and ask them to report back to the group.
3. Ask volunteers to create a group of people posing for a photograph in the middle of the circle. (Do this in small groups first if you think they’ll be reluctant to volunteer.) Ask a photographer to improvise taking the photo. Leave the students to interpret this in their own way.
4. Talk about how photography has changed. Now ask for volunteers to recreate the evacuees posing for a photograph. Ask your volunteer photographer what he or she would do differently. (No phones or digital cameras, harder to frame, not ‘instant’ – crowds of people might get in the way, can’t see the results straightaway.)
5. Ask one or two of your volunteer evacuees to speak their thoughts in character.
6. Continue to work in the circle or move into small group work. Ask students to create two more photographs in tableaux:

Create a photograph of a group of evacuees arriving at their destination. Pick a particular place to investigate – such as Bude in Cornwall in my story. If relevant, and if you can, link this to the places that local evacuees might have ended up.

The final photograph is of the same evacuees meeting up years later to have their photograph taken again. You could say it’s twenty years later, for example.

7. Ask students to bring their tableaux to life and to show the moments before and after the photograph was taken, so that the drama unfolds like this: The photographer moving into position, asking people to form a group and look at the camera, the moment of the photograph, and the moment afterwards when the subjects move away. Ask each student to consider what their character might be thinking about before and after the photo is taken.
8. Ask the whole group to come up with lines of dialogue, write it on the whiteboard, and ask each group to include it as they rehearse.
9. Show these improvisations to the rest of the group and use thought-tracking again so that some of the characters speak their thoughts out loud.
10. In your circle, discuss what you’ve discovered during the improvisations, and what you’ve learnt about the evacuee experience.

What next?

Students write a poem using the photograph of World War Two evacuees as a starting point. Once these poems are finished, use them as part of a display.

Extension activity

You could do similar with a contemporary photograph, asking for a tableaux, then the moments before and afterwards, plus dialogue. Then ask students to consider what people looking at that photograph in eighty years’ time will think of it.

Go to session two

Back to scheme of work overview

Back to resources for drama teachers