Teachers' Notes
The Learning Zone is a set of pupil activities based on a selection of historical source material about the bombing of Clydeside and the evacuation of children from Clydeside during the Second World War. Its aim is to give pupils the experience of using a wide range of historical evidence on a popular school history topic.
Pupils can participate in these activities without any specific knowledge of Clydeside other than that it was a typical target area during the war due to the concentration of heavy industry, which was at that time devoted to wartime production.
This Learning Zone is part of a larger site about the Blitz on Clydeside intended for general students and readers. The historical background to the topic is included along with a more extensive selection of sources.
A more detailed background to the Blitz on Clydeside is available using the following links:
Background
Clydebank
Maryhill
Evacuation
Pupil Activities
The Pupils’ area has a choice of eight activities which are all formulated as questions:
When one of these questions is selected, brief information and thumbnail images of a number of sources are displayed. These sources are accessed by selecting the associated PDF.
Multiple choice questions direct the pupil to particular sources in the PDF. (It would be advisable to ensure that Adobe Acrobat Reader has been downloaded before pupils begin to speed up the exercise.) The Adobe Reader can be freely downloaded from the Adobe web site.
When all of the questions have been correctly answered, the answers are transferred to a pupil notebook which can be saved to a file on the pupil’s computer or can be printed. (It cannot be saved on the site itself and must be saved or printed before pupils tackle another activity.) The pupils have an additional option to type their own notes about the sources they have examined. These notes will also be transferred to the pupil notebook.
The Scottish curriculum
Aspects of the home front during the Second World War are regularly taught between P6 and S2 in Scottish schools. At these stages, pupils are developing the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes of 5 -14 Environmental Studies on which Scottish school History syllabuses are based.
In S1 and S2 they may also be preparing to tackle the more specific skills of Standard Grade History which is the History syllabus for 14 to 16 year olds who choose the subject.
Full details of these syllabus guidelines can be accessed using these links:
5 -14 Curriculum Guidelines - Environmental Studies - Society, Science and Technology
Standard Grade History Arrangement Document
Teachers may also find it useful to have the strengths of the site related to specific strands of the 5 -14 syllabus.