Totley Primary School, Sheffield, wrote this super account of The History Van’s visit to the school for ‘Surviving the Stone Age’ with Y3:
History Van Brings the Stone Age to Y3
October 13, 2014
We had an amazing day today thanks to Jenny and her History Van. In the morning we travelled back in time 12,000 years to a time when Britain was still gripped by the Ice Age. We learned how hard it was to survive without any of today’s technology and how everything people needed to live had to be hunted or gathered, using simple tools made out of flint.
We split into 5 Stone Age families and experienced a range of different activities: making stone-headed arrows from sticks and leather string; cleaning animal skins with sharpened flint; hammering animal gut to make it flexible enough to use for a bow; sorting through rocks to separate out the valuable ones and identifying Stone Age creatures using only their ancient bones.
In the afternoon we moved forward 4000 years to the New Stone Age and sampled a range of more sophisticated activities. These included: milking and looking after a sheep; inventing games from pebbles and sticks; cooking meat around a fire; grinding wheat to make corn and combing wool and spinning it to make simple yarn.
To finish off a brilliant day, we all got together and sat around a stone circle we had made, while Jenny led a prayer to the Stone Age sun god and we told our buried ancestors about what we had been up to!
The History Van 