In the Summer Holidays Arbeia Roman Fort and The Customs House have a special show called ‘OFF THE WALL’. Check it out below! 
This year Hadrian’s Wall celebrates it’s 1900th anniversary. To mark this special occasion, we have created our very own ‘Hadrian’s Wall at Harton’. Every class from Nursery to Year 6, have been learning about Hadrian’s Wall. The children used what they had discovered to write a fact about the wall on a brick which we used to make our enormous wall!
After spending a lesson editing out their mistakes; adding music and sound effects; and altering the volume of different tracks of audio; the children completed their podcasts.
So please listen and enjoy.
Ancient Entertainers – Jessica, Layla, Sonny and Riley
Diving into History – Jack, Ella, Dylan and Faith
History Mystery – Maci, Leo, Grace and Zak
Rewind from the Future – Jacob, Jax, Ryan, Tilly and Celine
Wacky but Weird Mystery – James, Madisyn, Ellie and Jensen
William’s Wacky Wonders – William, Bella, Molly and Flynn
Using their knowledge from the research they did before the half term, the children have crearted their own podcast.
They wrote their own scripts, took roles of experts (or Maya priests and villagers from ancient times) and recorded their podcasts in the last lesson.
Now their task is to edit out any mistakes they have made and add music to make their show sound more professional – using Garageband.
Y2L thoroughly enjoyed their Great Fire of London workshop. They played lots of games and used drama to act out the historical event.
Check out the amazing artwork year 4 produced after learning about the Ancient Egyptians. They used paper straws and paint to create their own death masks inspired by that of Tutankhamun. They also used clay and metallic paint to create scarab beetles. The Ancient Egyptians believed they were symbols of wisdom and could be used as amulets for good luck.
We were lucky in Year 5 to have a drama workshop all about the Maya, which is our current History topic. We started with some true or false questions, then created freeze frames of different parts of Maya life.
Here we are acting out Pok-A-Tok (a Maya ball game where the players could not hit the ball with their hands, and the objective was to get the ball through a stone hoop at the end of the playing field.)
The Maya built many temples and painted them red, although we can’t see the red colour any more.
The Maya had a hierarchy in their society: slaves were at the bottom, followed by farmers, warriors, astronomers, priests and finally the king (known as the ajaw).
To finish off our workshop, we acted out the Maya creation story.
The two creator gods were able to think of anything they wanted, and it would appear. So they thought up trees and mountains. Then they realised they needed something that would praise them, so they thought of animals.
However, they realised the animals couldn’t speak to praise them, so they made people out of clay. But the clay people just crumbled to the ground.
The gods then decided they needed the people to be stronger and harder, so they made men from wood.
These men could not speak to praise the gods, so they destroyed them. Finally they made men from corn paste. These men could speak and praise the gods, but they could see too much so the gods removed some of their vision. They didn’t want the humans to be as powerful as them.
We had so much fun and tried so hard with our acting!
Year 3 had so much fun at Beamish! We enjoyed visiting the new 1950’s Front Street where we explored Norman Cornish’s house. Inside of Norman Cornish’s house, we did some observational sketching of what we could see. We also explored the history of the 1900’s village and pit village- some of us even got the chance to go down the coalmine and experience how it would have been for children to work in the cold, dark and damp conditions. To finish the day, we visited the Victorian school and discussed the differences in school life compared to ours today. We even had a try at using the metal hoops and sticks in the school playground- it was super tricky!
This year Hadrian’s Wall is celebrating its 1900th anniversary. Years 1 to 6 took part in online workshops delivered by Tyne and Wear Museums as part of their ‘Virtual Hadrian’s Wall Day’.
We are working on a very exciting project in school. We have all been learning about Hadrian’s Wall and every child has made their own ‘fact brick’. We look forward to sharing the finished project with you soon!
Here are some pictures of our bricks. Can you guess what we are building?
We had a fantastic time when Richard, That History Bloke came to visit to help us learn all about George Stephenson. We took part in a True or False game and compared photos to help find out about George growing up. Then, we looked at his inventions, including the Geordie Lamp and The Rocket locomotive. We even made our own candles that miners used to use and created clay models of The Rocket.
