Friday 4th July 2025

What a week we’ve had?!

Firstly, we had author Geraldine McCaughrean visit us on Wednesday to tell us about the inspiration for her book, Under A Fire-Red Sky. We asked her questions about her characters, about the process of writing and publishing a book and she showed us photos of her dad, who was a member of the London Fire Brigade during WWII. She even brought in his badge!

Today, we’ve had our WWII Evacuation Day and it has been absolutely jam-packed! We started the day filling in our evacuee labels so we wouldn’t get lost on the way to Berkshire. Then we used a bit of imagination to walk out to the station and travel to Great Shefford; the village we were being evacuated to. We had a 1930’s style arithmetic lesson, where we recited times tables and copied out a whole page of calculations. Then we learned a poem and handwrote a copy of it, along with a letter home to our parents telling them how we were getting on.

Then there was an Air Raid Siren!

We went out onto the playground to listen and to have Mike from the RAF Welford Historical Society tell us about it. He then came in for a visit with us to tell us what the local area was like during the war, including how Welford Air Base and Greenham Common were involved in the war effort. He even told us some stories of what he remembered seeing as a young boy in the 1940s.

We had an experience of wartime food at lunch time, where we had a choice of bread and butter, Spam or corned beef sandwiches, with tinned peaches and evaporated milk to finish!

After lunch, we had an outing to St Mary’s church, where we met some of the bell-ringers and the church warden and were allowed up the bell tower to ring the second bell just like they did to celebrate VE Day! We also looked at the War Memorial and read the names of the men from Great Shefford who lost their lives in WWII.

Finally, we learned about the Dig for Victory campaign and designed our own propaganda posters to encourage people to grow their own food.

We loved our experience of being evacuated – here are some of our highlights....

Ringing the bells (- almost everyone who gave it a go!)

Designing a Dig for Victory poster – Isabelle

Writing the poem - Isabella

Time travelling! - Eleanor

Trying WWII style food - Ashley

Seeing a real air-raid siren - Sully

Meeting someone who lived through the war - Tayla

I liked the 1930’s style maths and English - Sophie