This morning, we leant about one of the most important documents in British and World history, the Magna Carta.
To help understand it, we watched a series of videos explaining why it was made. Mr C even pretended to be the horrible King John and boss us around unfairly! We even had a look at our very own replica.
Thanks to this document, people have to the right to a fair trial and powers of the country are shared.
Here is the link to all the chapters to the videos:
After looking at healthy living and our recent harvest assembly, we looked at what everyday Normans would eat.
We practise our chopping skills by trying out different techniques including dicing and julienned. Our ingredients included spinach, carrots, herbs, onions and even a freshly picked marrow from our local farm.
Yesterday, we all went to Stafford Castle to learn even more about the Normans. We explored the bailey and used our imaginations to help us picture what it would look like. We ran up the motte and pretended to storm the keep!
At the keep, we discovered that there has been 4 castles built on the site, including the wooden Norman motte and bailey. We held and wore helmets, chainmail and swords as well as have a mini Battle of Hastings. There was also replicas of the Bayeux Tapestry and we looked at them to learn more.
All of us were able to make lavender bags and mint Norman coins. Normans used herbs to help heal cuts and wounds. To make the coins, we used a hammer to press the Norman heads and tails onto a piece of metal.
On the way back, some of us fell asleep so Mr C took photos for our class book! Everyone really enjoyed touching and feeling the armour and weapons. It was an incredible experience.
Thank you to everyone at Stafford Castle for an amazing trip and the cool gift bags at the end!
After victory at the Battle of Hastings, William and his Normans worked their way through England and Wales. As they progressed, they built wooden Motte and Bailey castles to defend themselves against rebellious Saxons.
Today, we looked at the features including a keep, a motte, a bailey, a ditch and the palisade fencing. We also scouted for appropriate land to build castles on and identified positive and negative reasons for each area.
Finally, we constructed our own Motte and Bailey castles, trying to include as many features as possible.
Today, I sent some of my finest knights to different areas of our school to make a census of the land! There were many ploughing fields and farmers as well as a few blacksmiths and even a priest.
Here is the link we used to view Willington’s entry in the Domesday Book, you can search for other villages in the search box too.
Today, we discussed the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and who should have been the rightful King of England. King Edward died leaving no heir to the throne. The powerful Theigns of England decided that Harold should be the next king. William, the Duke of Normandy, believed he should’ve been the king and this started the Battle of Hastings.
Here are just a few examples of our ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ writing tasks. Some of us really improved on our ideas and structure!
To explore the tapestry in more detail, we all had a go at sketching a section. We all tried really hard and after nearly 2 hours, some of us have only just started adding colour! We listened to some classic music whilst sketching and we loved it.
