Ben's D-Day Project

My kids are homeschooled, and my wife Michelle does a fantastic job with the vast majority of the work with them.  Occasionally, though, I get the chance to do some fun school stuff with them.

For the past few weeks, my kids have been working on Word War II project presentations.  The plan was for each of our boys to prepare and present a project on a particular aspect of World War II that they would present to another homeschooling family.  Their family would also prepare projects to present to us.

My son Benjamin (4th Grade) decided that he wanted to do a presentation on D-Day that included a Heroscape model of the invasion on Omaha Beach.

I downloaded some pictures of Omaha Beach including this one for some visual perspective on the landscape:

And this one gave us another perspective on the landscape of Omaha Beach, but also gave us some perspective on the Allied invasion plan and the German defenses.

We decided that the whole beach would be beyond our capacity to build, so we focused on one section of the beach.  We build the section identified in the Allied plan as "Easy Red" and included the edge of "Fox Green" so that we could incorporate the fortification near the edge of "Easy Red".

With a handful of images at our disposal, we set out to make the best representation of the coast of Normandy that we could.  We started with the beach itself then adding the water on one side and the first level of grass on the other.



Then we built up the cliff on the one side of the board and the slope up the other side with a ravine in between the two trying to make the board appear as much as possible like our source images.  When the board was finished it looked like this:

Add a bunch of Airborne Elite and a few Sgt. Drake Alexanders (both ROTV and SOTM) in a handful of overturned 7-hex concrete tiles, and you have an Allied invasion force.

Add a few squads of 10th Regiment of Foot (because when you don't have any Nazi figures, you make do with what you've got, regardless of the historical reality) in the German bunkers, and you've got yourself a great D-Day presentation Heroscape Board.

Benjamin also wanted to add a few trees to the board despite there not being any at all in our source images.  We call it creative license.

I wanted to include Benjamin's presentation in this blog, too, not so much because of its connection to Heroscape, which is minimal, but because I'm a proud father sharing the good work of his son.

This is some of the fun and educational stuff you get to do (with Heroscape) when you homeschool.

Happy Heroscaping.