The children completed many tasks including building their own village complete with shelters, making a campfire, cooking a vegetable stew (adult led), throwing “spears” to catch imaginary mammoths and reindeer, excavating an archaeological site for evidence of primary sources(tool heads), foraging for berries and nuts in the trees (pictures of them!), identifying tree types, dissecting Stone Age “poo”, erecting their own Stonehenge, carving tool heads (out of soap!) and making bow and arrows (using sticks).

These activities helped the children to understand and learn how Stone Age people had to move around to find food and what foods they ate, how they lit fires, how they built their shelters, consider how Stone Age people moved the stones to build Stonehenge, how persevering the people must have been as everything took so long to do! Mrs Parry asked them to imagine living with only those shelters for their home. The children made comparisons between Stone Age and their lives today. They realised archaeologists discovered lots of information about prehistoric life by looking for evidence and clues. Writing and cameras had not been invented but we can see secondary sources of evidence today using non-fiction books, photos and websites.

Bluebirds showed real concentration and perseverance this afternoon, when they each made a proportional timeline about the Stone Age. This helped up to see just how long ago this happened! It was interesting to see quite a few events all happening within 20,000 years which is a relatively short time on our very long timeline!

Bluebirds found out how long ago the Stone Age was today (well done Dylan!). They talked about the length of time this covered and learnt what A.D. and B.C. stood for. Initially Bluebirds thought they’d been alive for a long time…..seven or eight years. Afterwards, some children realised that in fact, in relation to the Stone Age, they had lived for only a very short amount of time! Next lesson, we are going to make a proportional timeline to see and understand this further!

We talked about chronological order and the class worked together to put some dates into the correct order. Lots of concentration was needed too!

Bluebirds researched using the internet this afternoon, to find out what Ancient Egyptians ate and drank. Afterwards, they designed a menu and found out that the currency there now is Egyptian pounds.

This afternoon, Bluebirds have been learning all about hieroglyphs as part of their topic on Ancient Egyptians. They found out there are over 700 different ones and sometimes there is more than one symbol or picture for the same letter. After decoding a message from Mrs Parry, the children wrote secret messages for their partner to solve!