Pupils from Helsby Hillside, Helsby Horn’s Mill and Alvanley and Manley Primary Schools recently walked through the doors of Helsby Methodist Church to find themselves back in the year 1939 – wartime Britain.
Organised by children’s worker Cath Clarke and run with the help of church volunteers, many of whom were dressed for the part, the children were introduced to their ‘evacuee families’.
The varied interactive workshops on the theme of ‘remembering’ covered rationing, hearing first-hand wartime stories whilst sitting in a mock Andersen shelter, and making poppy wreaths of hopes and dreams.
The workshops helped children realise that the Second World War involved people just like them and teaching staff said that the Anne Frank workshop was an excellent introduction to teaching children how to deal with loss.
The Hope Journey, written by Nicola Langton-Miller, was founded in 2008 to support primary schools in delivery of certain areas of the RE syllabus and ‘remembering’ is just one of them.
Helsby Methodist Church ran their first ‘remembering’ hope journey last year and it was so successful that they ran it again and hope it will become an annual event. One of the teachers accompanying the children at Helsby’s hope journey said: “The knowledge, personal experiences and costumes brought it all alive and made it interesting and memorable.”
