Always eager to please, K cheerfully comments that "If I was a criminal I'd do it properly and rob a bank ...." "... or burgle a house" adds W helpfully. I spend the next 10 minutes explaining how there are much better career options than criminal mastermind but they've seen Despicable Me so I don't think they're buying it.
So we had crime on the mind (hopefully not dreaming up more ways to be an evil genius) while we did a bit of craft and W came up with a cool robber design for a peg person. Just to be clear being a robber is definitely not cool, but W's peg person was.
He set about making a prison for his robber. As we chatted about prisons we ambled onto escaping which led us nicely to the Great Escape which took place 72 years ago, on the night of 24th March 1944.
The co-incidence of the date was too good a history opportunity to pass up, so we did some WWII revision and took a quick tangent into the Jewish faith, persecution and brain washing.
Using the fabulous resources from the National Archives, which are easily adapted to suit upper and lower KS2, we looked at Belsen and eye witness accounts from the liberation. It's a perfect platform for exploring human reactions to cruelty, hunger, trauma and the logistics of war.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/sessions-and-resources/
We read an interview with a now elderly Auschwitz SS guard who escaped prosecution to briefly explore the difficult issue of holding individuals to account decades after an event. It's heavy going for an 8 and 9 year old so we only touched on it lightly, but I was amazed that the boys were able to articulate thoughts on something so ethically complex - they recognised it wasn't a black and white issue and felt that what he'd done with his life in the intervening decades might be relevant.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-interview-with-a-91-year-old-former-auschwitz-guard-a-988127.html
Cheering up was needed and it was too early for me to have a gin so we moved onto the headline topic : the daring and wonderful great escape from the camp at Sagan. We thought about the practical problems of escaping and looked at the ingenious ways the escape committee managed to conceal their efforts, shore up the tunnel and make civilian clothing.
We used this history of the great escape, plus it has a handy quiz at the bottom :
http://www.historyonthenet.com/ww2/great_escape.htm
War and imprisonment never have a happy ending so it was fitting that only 3 of the escapees made it to the UK, 23 were returned to the camp and 50 were murdered on Hitler's direct orders. The boys could hardly believe it and looked genuinely crestfallen; we're too used to the good guys always beating the odds in stories and films.
To finish off, we looked at images and plans of the tunnels and the boys reconstructed hut 104 and 'Harry' tunnel in Minecraft.
An unplanned topic and fairly heavy going but we covered a lot of ground and had some fantastic discussion. So it's not all doom and gloom.
Except for peg robber. He's serving life.....
.... for pinching things.
