Introducing the activities to the pupils
Preparation
Prepare the class by leading a discussion on front page layout, content and writing style using modern day examples of the reporting of war and disaster.. Pupils might want to consider:

· The use of photographs on the front page, their relative size and prominence

· The content and style of headlines and banners

· The tone of the reporting

· The use of eye-witness quotations

Demonstration of the interview activities
 · Before you start, download and print out the ‘How to find and play the Laurie Holmes interview files’ helpsheets and a copy of one of the reporter’s notebooks. Make sure that a copy of RealPlayer has been installed on your machine. There is a free copy on the Sainsbury Virtual Museum website which only takes a few minutes to install. You may need to check with your ICT co-ordinator before you install RealPlayer in case you overwrite any existing software or come up against protection devices on your system which might prevent RealPlayer being installed.

· Load the Sainsbury Virtual Museum and show the class how to access the site.

· Explain that there were two raids on East Grinstead which damaged or destroyed the Sainsbury store:
   9th July 1943 by a bomber plane
   11th July 1944 by a V1 flying bomb or Doodlebug (there is a picture of a V1 rocket on the Sainsbury website)

· Show the pupils how to open and close the thumbnail pictures of air-raid damage of the street and the store.

· Show the pupils how to download and play the extracts of the interview with Laurie Holmes (there is a downloadable ‘How to’ worksheet on the Virtual Museum website which shows you how to do this and is there to support this demonstration and the pupils’ independent work)

· Explain that Laurie Holmes worked at the East Grinstead store during the Second World War when he was a young man, and that this interview was recorded in 1995, fifty yearsafter the war. You might want to discuss with the class how reliable this interview might be as an accurate historical account of the air raids.

· Tell the class that they are going to ‘interview’ Laurie Holmes using prepared questions in the East Grinstead Evening News reporter’s notebooks (there are two downloadable reporter’s notebooks – one for each raid)

· Choose one of the RealPlayer files and one of the set of questions in the reporter’s notebook and ‘walk through’ the activity with the class, replaying the interview as and when necessary

Producing the newspaper front page
You will need to decide how the class or each group are going to produce their front page, on paper or on the computer. It might be useful to employ both methods with different groups so that the class can compare the advantages and disadvantages of the ICT and non-ICT solutions. 

On paper
 · Groups producing their front page on paper will need a large piece of paper on which to mount their work

· They will need to know that photographs can be printed out directly from the site. If they want the pictures to be bigger, they could copy and paste them into a word processor and then resize them. There is a downloadable ‘How to’ sheet explaining how to print from the site.

· Their stories could be written by hand or on a word processor. If done on a word processor they could use the Format Columns command (if their computer has a version of Word) to change them into newspaper-style columns.

· Assembling the page will be is a straight scissors-and-paste job, cutting out the photographs and text and arranging it on the A0 sheet. 

· The end result should be a giant front page newspaper on the effects of air raids on a local community during the Second World War, making an excellent wall display. 

On a desk top publisher
· At the end of this booklet, there is a ‘How to’ worksheet telling you how to set up the page, type in text and copy and paste pictures from a website. It is for Microsoft Publisher only.