On the 23rd January 2014, 16 pupils (including me) went on a day trip to Maidstone Museum and then Maidstone Library. Overall, it was quite fun day, and we learnt a lot of things in the process.
First off, at the start of the day, once we had arrived at Maidstone Museum, we each took a seat along a table. One seated, two men came into the room, dressed in the typical WWI soldier uniform, and started giving us a talk. They were telling us about all kinds of things, and one thing that stood out was the uniform they would wear. One of our friends from the group actually got to try out replicas of the garments they would wear, and it did look slightly ridiculous.
However, the main point of this project is football and peace, so of course we were trying to work out whether or not the Christmas Truce actually happened. During the course of it, we were presented with many artefacts from the time, which I was quite surprised to be presented with, considering they were almost 100 years old. After that, we got to have a little look around some parts of the museum (mainly war medals and other things relating to that). Then, it was onto the library.
Once arriving at the library, we were given a long talk. This part of the day was mainly focused on how our local area was affected by the war and what they did during and after the war, which was rather interesting. We were shown some items of propaganda that were used to try and persuade members of the public to enlist and sign up and, then, we were given a task to do for ourselves. We were split up into I believe either 4 or 3 groups, and we each had a different type of resource at hand (we had the newspaper, while other people had things like computers), and we were given questions to answer, the answers of which were found in our resources. Most of the questions (at least our one) related to the history of our school precisely, which was quite nice to learn).
So, overall, it was a very good day. I think all of us had a lot of fun, and it would be good to do again.
By Connor Wade