Impressions of war: Activity 3

Letters home

The Accrington Observer and Times
Life in the Trenches		Good News for a Wife
Enlargement (59kb)	Transcript	Enlargement (57kb)	Transcript

This section looks at two letters that were printed in The Accrington Observer and Times newspaper during World War One. The activities encourage the students to look at the content of the letters and think about whether they are realistic accounts of what was happening and whether the students think the experiences described are true or not.

Introduction

Read both articles aloud in class. Discuss the content and whether the students think that the writers are telling the truth.

Discuss what might have been left out of the accounts.

Discuss why they may be leaving things out of the accounts and descriptions.

Do they think that the letter from Pte. Sam Ellison is real or do they think an enemy wrote it?

Task 1: Hot seating

Arrange the class so that the pupils are sitting in a half-circle and a chair is at the front. This chair will be called the hot seat. The aim is for a child to sit on the seat and pretend to be a character. The rest of the class take turns to ask the student in the hot seat a question about the life of the character they are pretending to be.

It is always advisable to start off a hot seat session with the teacher in the seat so that they can model the role-play and then change seats with a student.

Ask the pupils to imagine that the student in the hot seat is one of the men who wrote the letters. The class asks them questions about the conditions they were fighting in and how they felt about the Great War. After they have done this for a while and become used to the procedure, change characters and pupils.

The person in the seat now is the wife of Pte. Sam Ellison and the questions should be directed at her and about her life without her husband, about her missing him and her fears for the future.

If your class is not used to doing a hot seating session, download these questions to help them get started.

The hot seating session will help the students empathise so that they are able to complete the next activities with ease.

Task 2: Good News for a Wife

Ask the students to imagine they are the person who received this letter (i.e. Pte. Sam Ellison's wife). Write a response telling him the good news of the family but also raise some of the questions that you want to find out such as where exactly is he, how sick is he, when will he be home and what are the conditions he is living in like. Download in Microsoft Word format, an example of the letter written by a member of staff at The British Library.

Extension activity for the next lesson

Give out the letters that were written in last week's lesson to the class. Ensure the students have a different letter from their own.

So that they do not get embarrassed because their hand writing can be distinguished, ask a teaching assistant to type or hand write the letters before giving them out to the class.

Encourage the students to write a letter in response to their new letter and to answer many of the questions that are asked. They can embellish the account if they wish so that the real horrors of being a prisoner of war and actually fighting in a battle can be described.

Use the Life in the Trenches article to help with the descriptions of life as a soldier.