What were the dangers faced during D-Day?

The two objectives of this lessons are to emphasise the extreme dangers involved in the D-Day landings but also to introduce KS3 students to the new type of source utility questions at KS4 (focus on Edexcel “How useful is… for an enquiry into…” but can also work more generically for source evaluation in general).

The starter is a WW2 prior knowledge quiz which reveals panels of a mystery image for students to guess. This quiz may need to be adapted depending upon students’ prior knowledge but the questions are quite standard causes/events of WW2. Students then use a fantastic 3 minute video to answer who, what, why, where when? questions about the event.

To gain the necessary contextual knowledge to effectively evaluate the sources, they read a passage an highlight “Dangers faced by soldiers”.

There is then an introduction to a source evaluation technique we call COP (content, own knowledge and provenance). Students evaluate the usefulness of a first-hand account of a landing on Omaha. They then write up their evaluation using a writing frame if required (SEN support). As an extension, students can try to apply the COP technique to a completely fresh photograph source. Alternatively, this extension activity makes a good homework.

In the plenary, students hear some extracts from a high-level answer and have to idenify them as either content, own knowledge or provenance.