On Wednesday 22nd of January, all of Year 6 were lucky enough to visit the Tank Museum at Bovington. This was our second trip of our World War Two topic and we used this one to explore what life was like for both civilians who were left at home and those who served abroad.
Our day started with an introduction to the museum and it was explained that there were lots of different exhibitions and that a lot of them we could interact with and use. We were also talked through the two workshops that we would be completing that day: Life in Britain during WW2 and Build a Tank.
During our Life in Britain workshop, we learnt about all of the different jobs that people took up on the homefront during the war. We looked closely at Air Raid Wardens, the Home Guard and the Womens’ Land Army and the important jobs that they completed. Everyone got to join in with dressing up at the end of the session as our workshop leader completed a drill march with the whole class.
The second workshop that we took part in saw us build a scale model of a Sherman tank. Everyone took part in building the tank from the ground up and we learnt a lot about the different parts and engineering know-how that went in to designing and building it.
When we weren’t completing a workshop, the rest of the museum was our oyster! We explored the main area where we saw a variety of different tanks ranging from the oldest one there to modern warfare tanks. The trenches of the First World War was our next stop and we were amazed at the exhibitions and how you could imagine how terrifying it would have been to see a tank coming over the top. We also spent time looking at the importance of horses during the war and ended our time looking at life during the Gulf Wars.
All of the students had a fantastic time and took so much away.
