Growing Up in World War Two

An exploration of family life during wartime

What was a wartime childhood like? Exciting? Uncomfortable? Worrying? This booklet encourages children to appreciate the wartime experience through projects, quizzes and by talking to older people who grew up during World War Two.

For this project we teamed up with Deb Martin, a local interpreter for museums. It was a creative partnership that sparked off lots of imaginative ideas. Our booklet is intended to stimulate children's imagination and help them to make their own assessment of how they might have felt had they, too, grown up during wartime.

Each pair of pages has a jumble of letters from evacuees, period printed ephemera, 'Mystery Objects' for children to identify with the help of older people, photographs and quotations, questions and quizzes.

Growing Up in World War Two won First Prize in the Leicestershire Heritage Awards

A5 - softback - 32pp - full colour and black sections

Put that Light Out! Can you find out any more stories about the blackout?

Can you pair up two objects on the right-hand page to make a wartime food mixer?

What was the Land Army? Do you know someone who can tell you?

Peter goes off to Harvest Camp with his schoolmates. Can you find him in the photograph?

A Few Answers, but not all of them. The Morse code message says: this country is at war.

Project: Scrapbook. What was it like getting out of bed in the morning? Did you have a favourite cartoon character?

Project: Making Memories. Make a Time Capsule - your collection will seem very old-fashioned thirty years from now.