Cover World Wars with younger kids?

[sbgrace]

Has anyone covered WWI or WWII with a younger child (say second or third grade)? If so, how did you approach the topics? I'm not sure how to cover these time periods in an age appropriate way essentially.

[Aubrey]

I have not covered them yet, but we'll be getting to them this yr w/ 9yo & 7yo. I haven't completely decided what to do, but I'm *thinking* a very shallow, big picture statement of what the wars were about--they've read about Napoleon, so Hitler could be brushed over as a power-hungry dictator.

 

Ds loves strategy games, so we'll play Axis & Allies for WWII. That will help w/ some of the geography & military technology, which will interest him.

 

Beyond that, I figured we would only go more in-depth w/ things like biographies. Einstein, Churchill, lighter on Hitler & Stalin.

 

The US involvement--things like victory gardens, women in factories, rationing--would all probably be fine.

 

I don't plan to skip the Holocaust, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to do more than say taht it happened at this age.

 

HTH.

[Guest]

I used a "Home Front" approach when dd was eight or nine. We focused on some carefully chosen aspects of life in the US during the wars. Looking at war itself was far too overwhelming for my dd at that age, especially a war (WWII) so recent that both her grandfathers fought in it, her mother grew up looking at wreckage from it (in Honolulu), and her dad grew up under postwar British rationing in the 1950s.

[stripe]

Do you have a way to look at how it affected your family members or other acquaintances personally? For example, any who served in the military, were in concentration camps, any who were in internment camps, women who worked in the factories, or otherwise have a story to tell?

[SweetMissMagnolia]

yes my son is very sensitive about such things so I've been wondering the same thing....he's just 7 so we aren't quite there yet,but I've been worried about how to approach it too.....