This project involved sixty 10/11 year old children (KS2 –YR6) from Old Hall Drive Primary School, Gorton, Manchester.

The project was based on Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Scheme of Work – History Unit 9/Year3/4 – What is it like for Children in War? This Scheme of Work is intended to develop children’s understanding of the reasons for and results of wars and how children are affected by such events.

The aim of the project was to intensify the meaning of war for the children through their creative involvement in the project work and to encourage them to empathize with the experiences of children who find themselves in the environment of a city at war.

This project began with a visit by children, teachers, parents and artists to the Imperial War Museum North designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind. The children were introduced to the concept of ‘the broken globe’ on which the architect based the design of the building. His concept is that the parts of the building represent the pieces of the globe broken by war and these pieces are named after the elements – earth, air and water – the locations in which war takes place. The children found this concept easy to understand and very relevant to the way buildings are ‘broken’ by war.

During the visit the children watched ‘the big picture show’ – Children in War - in which images, text and sound are projected into the irregular spaces contained in the structure of the building. The unconventional appearance of the building and the integration of building form, imagery and meaning had such an impact on the children that they were aware of the aims of the project from the outset.

The impact was even greater due to the project workshops beginning on the same afternoon as America and its allies invaded Iraq and so over the following five weeks the children were immersed in images of war through the television news coverage. This gave the project a sense of reality and immediacy that was taken up by the teachers in the classroom work they planned around the project.

From the beginning of the project the teachers had decided to work with the children on reading and discussing The Diary of a Young Girl (Ann Frank). It was decided to link this classroom-based work directly into the project through a project scenario in which the children were asked to imagine themselves in a similar situation to Ann Frank when she had gone into hiding in Amsterdam.

The children were asked to imagine that Manchester was an occupied city and that there school had been bombed. They were separated from their families and were living in the basement of the school that had been damaged in the bombing. As part of the class based work they had to write a diary of this experience and record their feelings. Part of this experience was that they should imagine they went out one night to explore the housing estate that surrounds the school. During this exploration they find some toys, which they bring back with them and then start to imagine the lives of the children they belonged to and what has happened to them.

The children and teachers were introduced to the work of the German artist Anselm Kiefer in which he attempts to portray the empty and negative nature of war. The work of this artist was also selected because he incorporates words and phrases into his paintings and it was felt that this would encourage the children to combine words and images in their art also.

The children and teachers were also introduced to the work of the artists who made up the Arte Povera movement in Italy in the 1960’s. These artists and sculptors used unusual materials and techniques in their creative work in order to make people reassess the role of art in an affluent society. This aspect of their work was important for the Earth Air + Water project in order to emphasize to the children the shortages of materials due to war. For example, the children had to imagine that they had no paper due to the war and so some of their sketch drawings were done by scratching images on slate roofing tiles. The work of Arte Povera was used as a starting point for the design of the exhibition of the project with found objects being used as supports to display the work of the children.

In the first workshop the artists used the work of Anselm Kiefer as a starting point for a discussion of words to describe war. Following this the children produced paintings of their impressions of the exterior and interior of the War Museum. In their paintings of the interior the children incorporated the words to describe war and the images they remembered from ‘the big picture show’.

At the start of the next workshop the children were shown a black and white photograph from the Second World War of three children, similar in age to themselves, sitting on the curbstone outside their house which has been bombed. They were asked to put themselves in the place of these children and to imagine what they felt about their loss and the destruction around them.

They were also shown a number of black and white photographs of buildings that had been bombed and the way in which the walls and roofs had collapsed leaving the structure of the building exposed. The children were fascinated by the way that parts of the buildings were left undamaged by the bombs with pictures still hanging on the walls and beds still made. The children asked the questions: Could the fire still be burning in the grate? Would the clock on the shelf still tell the time?

During the workshop the children painted images of what they imagined there house would look like after it had been bombed or what they thought the school building would look like. Before the next workshop the teachers and artist selected four of these paintings to be developed as large-scale wall mounted collages that would form the centrepiece of the project exhibition.

Over the next two weeks the children worked in groups on the production of these collages.