Home-Front Heroes Collection

The Home-Front Heroes Collection is a series of middle-grade novels designed to offer quality children's books set in World War II, a time period that holds natural fascination for young students. Each book will feature a child protagonist between the ages of 12 and 14 living in America. The characters are from diverse ethnic groups and areas of the country.

As young readers follow the adventures of these wartime kids, they will also learn details about life in the 1940s. Each book is based on an actual person's experiences and children will learn about the real "hero" in the back of the book. Each book will also contain back matter with additional information about life in the 40s. Lesson plans will be provided to go along with each book. Teachers can choose any novel in the series depending on the focus they think would most interest their class.

To find out how to receive free books and lesson plans for your classroom, check out our Do Your Part School Kit program. You can also purchase copies of our books and lesson plans for your classroom by visiting our shopping cart.

A Fun Assignment for Your Students

Here's a fun assignment for your students that will teach them interviewing and writing skills and a bit about history. Once they've turned their interviews into stories of no more than 250 words, they can submit their stories to me and I'll post them on my website. I'll even choose one or two to highlight from each class. In this way, we'll start to develop a nice resource for kids to learn more about history from the people who actually lived it!

Assignment: Bringing True Stories to Life

1. Have your student choose a parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle or older neighbor and ask them if they have any good stories from their childhood. If they can't think of one, have the kids read them this list and see if they have any good memories of any of these events: World War II, The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the death of President Kennedy, the day the first man walked on the moon.

2. Have the kids write down the story in 250 words or less. It doesn't have to be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It could be just one exciting, interesting, sad or even funny memory. But if you want to add a creative writing element to this assignment, you could ask the children to turn their real person into a character and try to bring the memory to life in scene.

3. Have the kids send me their stories and I'll post them on my website. Please make sure the subject matter and language is appropriate. Ask the kids to use their best writing skills since others will be reading these accounts.

Make sure you send me the teacher's name, the kids' grade and the name of the school they attend.

WWII Links for Teachers http://connections.smsd.org/veterans/wwii_sites.htm http://www.history.com/classroom/classroom.html http://www.pbs.org/teachers/