St Paul's Catholic Primary School

A Voluntary Academy

Aspire not to have more but to be more – St Oscar Romero

History

We arrived at school last week to find that a discovery had been made by the school gardeners in the field! We had to take on the role of archaeologists to study the findings.

On bringing our findings back into class we took on the role of palaeontologists to measure, weigh and analyse the skulls and fossils we'd found. Using our knowledge of animals we identified the skulls as those of a ram, sheep and goat. The fossil was different. This was the skull of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

We continued in our role as palaeontologists by carefully excavating dinosaur bones from stone blocks. We then had to assemble and identify the dinosaur we had unearthed!

We then learnt about the famous fossil finder 'Mary Anning'. Our books about Mary and fossils can be found inside our 'Animal' topic books.

We had a fabulous time learning about houses and homes in the past on our visit to Staircase House. Mistress Catherine joined us from the past to show us around the house and we helped with her chores. We made up the wooden four poster bed for Lady Mary. We also made orange and clove pomanders and beeswax candles. We looked at the structure of the house; the house being made from wattle and daub. We constructed our own wattle and daub 'walls' from willow and clay, which were remarkably sturdy.

Our hands on activities continued into the afternoon when we visited the museum to look at artefacts from the past.

Group A photos

Group B

As an introduction to our theme of 'Great Explorers', the children were asked to think about what makes someone famous and were given 'famous' photographs to put into labelled groups. These are some of our ideas when it came to grouping faces from the past and present.