The Normandy Beaches with the children
The volcano. Eyjafjallajokull. Can you pronounce that!? I gather it’s ay-yah-FYAH’-plah-yer-kuh-duhl. Anyway, thanks to IT, we drove back to the UK after Easter, instead of flying. And instead of breakneck speed, our plan was to stop on our way at the Normandy beaches. Have you been yet? I hadn’t, and I’m 44, so I thought my children should see them a bit sooner than that, especially as World War II is such a key history topic.
Doing this without any background context would have been fatally.. terminally BORING for my kids. How to prepare? We rented ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and imagined what it was like to be in one of the first boats that landed on Omaha beach on 6 June 1944. We looked at a map of the coastline and wrote in Gold, Sword, Juno, Omaha and Utah. We booked the Overlord tour (www.overlordtour.com) which includes Omaha beach, the German battery and the American cemetery at Coleville-sur-Mer where 10,000 Americans are buried. And we listened again to Horrible Histories’ Woeful Second World War (www.amazon.co.uk) in the car. And for a first experience, it all fitted together.
Now my son is angling for a trip to Pearl Harbour but I think it’s for the surfing.
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