From Biggles to War Horse, novels and poetry about the first world war are a powerful way to introduce younger children to the experience and effects of war

I want to give my year 6 class some background to the first world war which will obviously be a major topic this school year. Can you advise me of any titles that they might enjoy?

As you may imagine given the centenary, there will be very many new books coming in the next 12 months which will commemorate different aspects of the war. But there are already excellent titles which will help your pupils' understanding.

For a starting point that is generally accepting of the conflict there are classic titles such as Biggles Learns to Fly by WE Johns which captures the excitement of a young flying officer embarking on an incredibly dangerous experience. The first in the series (which later also covers Biggles' distinguished career in the second world war), it tells of Biggles as a 17-year-old learning to fly in the very early days of the air service when the aircraft were rudimentary and flying tactics were nonexistent.

KM Peyton also captures the heady nature of those early flying days in The Edge of the Clouds, the second of her wonderfully romantic Flambards trilogy. In it, Will learns to fly and to mend the fragile aeroplanes he then takes up into the skies. In a remarkably well-balanced story, Peyton manages to convey the heady optimism of the very young while never ignoring the terrible threat of war and the very real disasters that it may bring that is hanging over them.

More contemporary titles are less equivocal: no one today attempts to show the first world war as romantic. Michael Morpurgo is particularly eloquent on the subject, most famously in War Horse which skilfully tells of the conflict through the voice of a horse serving in the cavalry troops which is gives it a particular and quasi-neutral view. In Private Peaceful he is grimmer in a moving story that tells of the last hours of a soldier who has taken radical action after being overwhelmed by his experiences and the desperate thoughts they provoke.

Most recently, as might be expected from his very particular interpretation of the second world war in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne gives a child narrator's apparently naïve but underlyingly insightful view of the behind the scenes effect of the war on the families left home and others who do not want to fight in Stay Where You Are and Then Leave. How Alfie pieces together the truth about what has happened to his father is skilfully described in a story that makes it clear that, even at the time, not everyone was committed to the call to arms.

To get back to a contemporary record of the time through the haunting poems of the young soldiers, Poems From the First World War, selected by Gaby Morgan and published in conjunction with the Imperial War Museum, serves as a critical reminder of what fighting in those particular conditions – and of any kinds – may feel like.