Year 5 have been to the Epping Forest District Museum on Thursday 4th November to discover more about the Tudors.
They began their day by looking at a time-line showing how long the Tudor period spanned and discussing what life would have been like, not only for Royalty, but also the ordinary lives of the people. Mrs Newbigging and Mrs Bull were delighted by how much the children contributed to the discussion and also the interesting questions that they raised.
Splitting into two groups, one began a tour of the Museum where they viewed Tudor artefacts. Children were also selected from each group to be dressed as Tudors. The talked about the different layers of clothing worn, what each layer was called, what their footwear was like and also how the Tudors would wash themselves. Ivy and Noah, Niaya and Maxwell definitely felt they would not have enjoyed dressing like this every day.
The second group commenced doing their Tudor workshops. Firstly, we were shown the Tudor alphabet and the goose feather quill that the Tudors would have used to dip in the ink. We had an interesting discussion on how the parchment paper was created. The children then went onto create. a book mark with their names written using the Tudor letter formation with a quill and ink. We all learned that this was quite a skill to master and everyone enjoyed trying something different. Those children with the letters J and V in their names had to replace them with an I and U, as these letters were not in the Tudor alphabet.
We went onto being shown how to create a French Knitting ribbon to attach to our book marks. These definitely required everyone to carefully watch the process. Everyone worked hard and definitely took their time to achieve this.
We were proud to receive an email from the Museum praising the children for their behaviour and contribution. We also greatly appreciated the time that the Museum gave to us and the many different ways in which the children engaged with the Tudor period.