Henry Moore Primary School, learning & teaching with artefacts
During the week of 10th - 14th July this year, I was part of a teaching team using archaeology as a hook to hang exciting, out-of-the-ordinary lessons on for groups of Key stage 2 children from schools in the Castleford-Featherstone area of West Yorkshire.
The activities took place at Smawthorne Henry Moore School, Castleford and children from both Henry Moore and neighbouring Oyster Park School took part.
In a team that consisted of teachers, the local government’s Archaeology Advisory Service Education Officer, the Education Co ordinator for a national community archaeology project run by the British Museum, lecturers and specialist history teacher trainees from Leeds Metropolitan University children from Years 4, 5 and 6 were offered a rolling programme of 3 different activities.
Activity 1 was an archaeological excavation where the young learners could get a chance to actually do it their own dig.
Activity 2 used real archaeological finds and active learning to bring the past to life through objects
Activity 3 used role play to add another dimension to the children’s discovery of history, with trainee teachers using hot seating and historical sources to add a personal touch.
I co-ordinated and delivered Activity 2, using real artefacts, the children’s prior knowledge, their imaginations and observation skills.
The session started with us using ‘The Skeleton Game’ as both an ice breaker and a bit of brain gym.
The first part of the session (about 10 to 15 mins, depending on the class and time of day) aimed to get brains warmed up and the children thinking about how archaeology works and why some things survive while others don’t.
Children were arranged in a large horseshoe (this worked both inside the classroom and out-of-doors on the school playing field).A quick plenary to find out who had seen archaeology programmes on the TV, read books or used websites about the subject and also find out how much the children already knew about the types of things that can be found under the ground, waste, decay and irreversible changes.
With every group, the children suggested that an archaeologist might find dead people/dead bodies/skeletons or bones.
So, to follow on from this, I asked the class teacher for a suitable volunteer. This next part of the lesson lasted about 15 mins, but is quite open-ended.
The volunteer had to "not wriggle or giggle" and lie still, in the middle of our horseshoe being our dead body. We looked at what the volunteer was wearing and together, as a plenary, tried to work out what would survive and what would not. A combination of closed and gradually more open questioning was used.
Would Ryan’s trainer’s survive? Yes? Which bits, the laces, the rubber soles, the plastic parts on the sides? What about his cap, would that rot, or not? Would Danielle’s pencil case survive? What about her glasses? What do you think would last longest in the ground? Which bits of a mobile phone would survive, what do you think?
The conversation was then steered towards the type of things that a person might like to be buried with and the children asked if they could think of special objects, things with meaning that they might like to buried with, if they had been a pagan Romano Briton. What type of objects would tell a future archaeologist about them?
The children were then given a proper skeleton recording sheet, the same as the ones used on commercial archaeological sites and asked to annotate them-either by writing, or for those who preferred, by drawing, to show the objects that they would choose to be buried with and to write down which parts of the object (if any) would survive for tens, hundreds or thousands of years. The kids came up with some great ideas. They talked about which parts of a family photograph might survive-the frame and glass, but not the photo itself. I told them the story of an Anglo-Saxon girl's grave that I had excavated and how she has a jumble of bones where her feet should have been and how, after careful observation and thinking, you could see that she had been buried with her feet resting on her pet dog.
This really caught the children’s' imagination, especially as the girl was probably about their age when she had died and prompted a whole flurry of questions and answers between the children and also some directed at me!After the skeleton activity, the kids were given, or rather got to choose from a big pile of artefacts, all real. I don't think that a replica works in the same way as the feel of the thing is so important and the artefact can't be a tangible link with the past unless it hass a real age and history.
The children were asked, in groups of 4, to pool their objects and arrange them in order of age, like a timeline. After this, they then had a go at recording and drawing the objects and working out what they thought they were.This activity takes longer than those preceding it but again, depends on how much time the teacher would like to spend with the children on it.
These 2 activities worked well together. You could do the skeleton activity for one lesson and artefacts for another. We were lucky with time as the children had been taken out of their normal lessons for either a morning or afternoon.This activity, or set of activities can be kept short or developed in a series of lessons or a block teaching; it’s very flexible. The main thing though is it works, its real and tangible, the children enjoy themselves and can be inspired and creative, the teachers and TAs can join in too and it is suitable for a whole spectrum of learning styles and literacy levels.
The skeleton game and the finds recording forms can all be downloaded from this website (under 'Resources'); why not have a go with your class?
