Life on the 'Home Front'

As part of our project on World War 2, we thought it might be fun and interesting to try living on war time rations for a week.
The children became very enthusiastic about this idea and suggestions about us all wearing 1940's clothes, playing war time games and living without certain luxuries began to come about.

So here we go with our week living on the 'Home Front'. Gas masks ready.........


Sunday
Everyone is really quite excited about our weeks project, especially the fact theat official 'school work' has been suspended for the week (they haven't worked out that they are learning through experience on this one)!

Poppy and Ruby dressed up in their 'War-time' clothes for church this morning. Our family does a cake sale once a month to support a child in Bangladesh, so this month all of the recipes were taken from our war-time cook book. The parishoners were delighted, altough a little sceptical about the food! They all happily shared information about their experiences of the war years.

Monday
Once again the children dressed in their simple clothes and today carried their gas masks (well covered boxes made to look like gas mask cases).
Fen went off to nursery so we had the perfect opportunity to do some uninterupted learning.
We started our day weighing our our rations.
We are prediminantly a vegetarian family and were really quite taken back by the rather pitiful 1oz portion of cheese that rations permitted per person per week. Sugar on the other hand, was to us rather 'over rationed'. 12 oz per person per week. That's quite a lot, although everywhere you read they complain that it wasn't much!!
We spent the rest of the morning deciding what clothes we would need for a year in exchange for our 66 clothing coupons. Lots of compromising was needed here and it promted much discussion. Ruby's needs used a whopping 250 coupons!
Poppy worked out that she could have 1 overcoat, 1 jacket, 1 raincoat, 1 skirt, 1 pair of shorts, 1 pair of trousons, 1 pair of shoes, 5 pairs of knickers, 1 cardigan, 2 blouses and 8 pairs of socks.
Adults clothes used more coupons, so my list was rather more limited then this.
Lunch - the children requested cheese on toast for lunch - not happening! Two slices of cheese on toast would have used up a persons cheese ration for a whole week, so we settled for jam!
The children spent the whole afternoon playing on the concrete outside. They used chalk to create good old 'hopscotch' games.
Tea - Cheese, potatoe and oatmeal vege pie with salad. Tim took one look at this and announced that he needed something with it....! Urrr there's a war on you know!!! He hooked a mariners pie from the freezer - this is only day one!
Pud - Dried fruit fritters....Poppy rightly pointed out that the recipe for fritters was the same as that which we use for glue....! Tasted good though....