What can St Michael And All Angels offer you?
Visits to St Michael’s Church. Visit the church, a presentation will be given to you in stages during your visit using visual images as well as using the activities suggested below and in the lesson plans.
- Find all the memorials big and small, inside and outside the church. Do they look how you imagined? Can you gain any clues about the people from the memorials?
- Take rubbings of some of the memorials.
- Make yourselves maps of where the memorials are in and around the church. Is
there any significance to their positioning? - Take photos of the memorials and of anything you might think is significant.
- Dependent upon weather take a walk around the church, what do you notice about the houses and the location.
- What has been learned by the site visit?
St Michael’s Visit to Your School. Presentation to the children showing the background stories of specific names from the memorials. Who were the people? How did they live and die? What was their relationship with Bedford Park, Chiswick and St Michael’s? How can they now use this information?
Presentation to the children showing how the information was researched and how the pupils could do this themselves. Show them how to take a name and walk through the process of finding more information. Give them the ‘tools’ to start their own investigations.
Follow Up Visit (either to St Michael’s or we come to your school)
What has been learnt since the previous visit?
What have your pupils got to show us? Displays, presentations, artwork, diaries, poems, plays?
What can be done going forward with the information or work that the children
have obtained or produced? Put it on our WW1 website, create their own
page on the school website, produce an assembly?
Historical resources
Listed below are a number of the resources you could use to research an individual. A lot of this work can be done online, for some of this work you may need to make a visit to a local library or to the National Archive centre in Kew; perhaps there is someone you could talk to who knew the person or has information about them.
- Parish Documents, Registers, Newsletters
- Talking to people whose families have lived in the area a long time and have their own records, photographs or maps.
- Contemporaneous news items from Newspaper Archives.
- National Databases.
- National Archives.
- Visits to the Imperial War Museum.
- Military Records
- Ancestry website.
- Census Records.
- Births, Marriages, Death Certificates.
- Maps.
- Immigration Records
- Probate Records.
- School Records.
Resources to download
Please click the links to download these resources.
Lesson plan template: lesson-template-ww1-research
Lesson plan example: lesson-template-example-yr5
Visit timetable: ww1-website-teachers-resources-visit-timetable
Examples of working walls from other schools that may inspire your own displays: ww1-website-teachers-resources-working-wall-examples
Suggested activities before & after working with St Michael’s
Prior to working on the St Michael’s WW1 Project
Age related research: Children to look at the BBC Schools pages for the appropriate Key Stage information relating to World War One. What can they learn about why the war started and what life was like at home?
What information can we get from other sources?
- Poems
- Stories
- Songs
- Diaries & Letters
- News Reports & Propaganda
Make a list of what you would want to know about someone if all you had was a name on a memorial? Keep this list safe so that it can be checked at the end of the project.
Find out what the different jobs were that women could do during the war.
After working on the St Michael’s WW1 Project
Look at your list of what you wanted to know, were you able to find all the information you wanted?
Make a list of all the different ways in which you can undertake research.
Create a working wall; create a display during the project that develops into a large display of the different types of work that the children have done.
Once the project is complete there should be a great example of the journey your pupils have been on.
Share some of the poetry, art work, letters and diaries that your pupils have created by putting them on the pupils page on our website, create a presentation to give us, we would be happy to attend.