Be Excellent To Each Other

Bean has the following homework:



History is easily my weakest subject, as I didn’t study history at school, so I’m not sure what areas of British History are interesting/fun to look at with an 8-9 year old.

My immediate thought was ‘we will make a model wattle and daub house out of willow, clay and straw, with cut-away areas to show the structural layers’, but I had that idea within ten seconds of reading the homework task and haven’t had a single alternative idea in the 24+ hours since.

So, people who actually studied history: do you have an alternative suggestion?

Don't forget to wind your watch.

Illustrated genealogy tree of monarchs, you could go horrible history style

Diorama of the great fire of London, complete with flickering orange lights in the window

Bayuex tapestry recreaction

Town crier proclamation roll, detailing the crimes of guy Fawkes

Model stonehenge as it was back then, but when you pull a switch, it collapses into how it is now

Make a lyre.

Steam powered submarines.

The battle of Rorke's Drift

The mass exodus from WoS.

Model MX-5 with glued locks.

Pint of Coke Shandy.

Dress a potato up as Henry VIII and have six new potatoes representing his wives and a leek being the pope looking on sternly in front of a monastery that has been ruined then repurposed a Sister's of Mercy photoshoot.

I do not know which vegetable would represent goth bands.

Doubly funny if king Henry VIII is actually a king Edward.

Black eye peas

And the sandwich! You could make the sandwich!

What are his interests? Or does he have a favourite place or building?

Sonething like that could be a jumping off point for ideas.

James 2 of Scots being really proud of his new cannon

The black death, and the great fire. He can sing and explain ring o ring o roses.

This is an ideal opportunity for you to binge on Horrible Histories videos!

The great fire of London his class’s large Yr2 project where they made a huge diorama, otherwise that would have made a great jumping off point simply because there are so many visual things you can do with that.

His interests are mostly space and science.

How a historical figure would view present day San Dimas.

Tim Peake

Roman conquest of Britain? Nice subject for a time line with a lot happening in a few hundred years.
Plenty of opportunity to compare costumes, houses and so on if you want to make something, and there’s some Roman sites you you could visit.

John Snow and cholera. Get to build some streets, draw a map, and talk about what we do today to protect our communities from wildlings.

Oh, I do actually know a little about this. The well/water pump guy, right?

Eee knors nuthin.

How about he draws/paints his own interpretation of the Battle of Hastings, a la the Bayeux Tapestry?

Could you do something sciencey or spacey and just smush some history over the top? Isaac Newton or Herschel and Uranus or the discovery of the structure of DNA or Charles Darwin or something.

Or Dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs lived in Britain, at some point.

All solid suggestions, although the uranus one is thin ice - or at least it is with my boys and their silly friends - but there's plenty of other space-science-history to cover.

Build a lego diorama? Print out some of those lovely pictures from the space telescopes (Hubble, Spitzer, Webb, and the others)?
How long it took to build the ISS, and the countries that collaborated?
Space Shuttle, or Apollo 11 are all history now.

How much is meant to be parent-driven? I'm never sure how much to help, as I always think it's pretty obvious when the kiddo has done very little of the actual work. I had a project in Year 5, we could pick our own topic, so I chose 'American cars' because my dad was thinking about buying a Firebird, so I bought a few magazines and cut out pictures, then stuck them in a book with a little bit of writing or something. It was VERY low effort and I got a good mark, I think I learned something significant about effort and reward, although perhaps the lesson I learned was not all that helpful later on in my life.

For this same topic, one of the other pupils (that i had a very bad relationship with) chose to do a project on 'everything I know' (I kid you not) and it was like a page and a half (on A5 paper) of writing about not very much.... oh how I laughed. Funny with stays with us. She probably still thinks I'm a little prick too, but hah, jokes on her as I got taller.

I think there has to be a fair amount of input from parents at least in the form of instruction *because* it is so open. The kids have only really studied The Great Fire Of London, and Ancient Greece (which doesn’t count for this as it specifies British history), so picking a point in British History is pretty open to having to be guided to some new area of learning.

We still haven’t settled on a subject, but I’m going to sit down with Bean tomorrow evening, go through these suggestions and see what he thinks, or if it prompts any of his own ideas.

Ge did mention wanting to visit the Black Country Living Museum yesterday, so that might also be a lead-in to something.

Could probably do something on the Elgin Marbles and how we've 'borrowed' them from the Ancient Greeks


This is a great place!

The Black Country Living Museum is the best place on earth... Fact!

Do a project on COVID lockdown. That was a historical event

Just bog rolls and Zoom calls. For 2 years

Diorama of Barnard Castle!

With hindsight, pretty tame compared to later Tory lock down violations.

Depends if the pie seller is there

Lolz I didn't notice the bit about it being UK history. Whoops.

Ten years ago that now you know. How time flies.

No way!

Pies were but a penny back then. You'd struggle to get a Pukka for less than 1.60 these days.