A Viking Adventure!

Children from year 4 enjoyed an unforgettable school trip this week to the Ancient Technology Centre in Dorset to experience life as a viking! The children took part in a range of immersive educational activities including grinding flour and making bread, picking vegetables and chopping them into a stew, and making their own cheese and butter. And that was just in the morning! In the afternoon children made bricks from chalk, chopped wood, tended the vegetable garden and played viking games. The children lived and slept in a viking long house, enjoyed stories and songs around the fire and thoroughly enjoyed themselves from start to finish. The children will return to school next week full of inspiration and knowledge. Thank you to the children for behaving so well and to the adults who volunteered their time to make the trip possible.

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Butser Ancient Farm – Bringing History Alive!

On Tuesday, Year 3 set off bright and early for a day of living like Stone Age children at Butser Ancient Farm!  They did a range of exciting, hands-on activities – pottery, archaeology, fence building and ‘clunching’ (making clay bricks).  We learned that life in the Stone Age would have been hard work and very grubby…

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Vi nyder os som vikinger!

The second group arrived this morning at the Ancient Technology centre and have already had a busy day. They have learned how to start fires and manage the flames, harvesting the autumn crops and helped the farmers get ready for winter. Dinner is now cooking! We are having such a lot of fun whilst learning a lot about the day to day lives of Viking settlers in England.

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We are Vikings!

The first group of year 4 children have arrived at The Ancient Technology Centre and have had an excellent afternoon fully immersed in Viking life. They have prepared a historically authentic meal and completed many of the seasonal tasks Vikings did on a daily basis. They have learned that being a Viking is both physically hard and requires many skills. Lunch has never tasted so good!

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Be the change you want to see in the world – Micawber Class Assembly

Well done to the pupils of Micawber class for their thought provoking assembly on the history of India and the role of Gandhi in leading its independence. Pupils did an excellent job of telling the life story of both country and Gandhi through drama including freeze frames. We learnt about the role that salt played in this tumultuous time and the close links to the history of the USA. Fascinating! Thank you Ms Alcock and the Micawber class adults for your support.

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Mapping the City

This week Year 5 visited the National Archive in Kew as part of their Borough and the River Thames topic. The children took part in a workshop named ‘Mapping the City’ which involved studying maps of London dating back to the Tudor period and noticing the great changes the city has undergone in the last 500 years. 
 

Studying the maps led to lots of discussion about how modern life is different from that of earlier time periods, and a debate about which time period would be the best to live in. After the trip, the classes walked back along the Thames to Borough Market, which gave them the opportunity to make comparisons between the maps they’d seen and the real, living London.

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Horrible Histories go back to 1914

Year 5 and 6 were treated to a fact filled performance by cast from The Horrible Histories. As the children sat down the simple props (a placard stating  ‘On the brink of War’ and khaki trench coats) set the scene for a creative learning experience. This term’s topic is Britain at War and the show talked the children through the stages of World War I, informed them of all the countries involved and worked up to talk about the impact on numbers of people who were injured, killed or missing in action. Despite such challenging content, the cast delivered it in a way that made it accessible and engaging. Thank you to our friends at The Ministry of Fun for organising this performance.

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