 |
Home
School Days - Using and adding to the CADHAS Archives
Launch of 'Trading Places'
Chipping Campden - an LHI story
Chipping Campden Archives - involving a local school
Chipping Campden - taking the project further
|
|
|
|
Chipping Campden Archives - involving a local school
Location: Gloucestershire
Jill Wilson, Chairman of Campden & District Historical and Archaeological Society (CADHAS), tells how the project worked with a local school.
We’ve set up links with the local primary school to make education packs. The school wanted to do some work on local history and walks around the town - they originally started from geography, walking round a field, measuring distances, that sort of thing.
They got in touch with one of our members, and as a result once a fortnight on Monday morning through the autumn term, these 7-8 year olds came out of the school and visited something in Chipping Campden. Various CADHAS members explained and showed them round the ruins of the old Manor House, then they went back to the school and drew it and wrote about it. They visited the church, then wrote about it, including some rather gruesome spooky ghost stories!
I’m a member of the British Sundial Society, so I took them round and told them all about the sundials in Campden. This was good for me because I had often talked to adults about it, but it was very different explaining them to primary school children. Even the teacher said she’d had no idea there were so many sundials in Campden. In fact, there are more sundials in Chipping Campden High Street than in any comparable - or probably much larger - place.
The children love to come along and then go home and swank to their parents that they know things about Campden that their parents don’t. And of course, we’re finding all sorts of interesting things out. We took a group of children to our 17th century stone marketing hall and asked them what they thought it was used for and one little lad said “My mother told me it was used to hang people” Then we had a discussion about what you did in a market hall that didn’t involve hanging! It was lovely.
Bringing the generations together helps everybody. Some are older retired people like me, some are adults from the Day Centre. Starting the school children so young, when they have no particular inhibitions about saying things and are not trying to say what you expect them to say, it’s a delight for everybody.
We’ve also encouraged school children to interview their parents about the games they played when they were children, and it was amazing what they turned up with.
This term, when the weather’s not good enough for them to go out, we are going into the schools, and they’re looking at the Home Front in the second world war. I’ve a list of questions as long as your arm about gas masks, and what it was like going to school in the war. We’re arranging for three people who were at school during the war to go in and they’ll divide the class up into three groups, and they’ll spend ten minutes with each person. Everyone had gas masks, and we had some bombs here too - even so far out in the countryside.
Our latest exhibition was a display in the Courtroom of all the work the children had done for last term, which was absolutely delightful, and a selection of it was displayed in the foyer of the Old Police Station."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
