On Wednesday, we had another wonderful visit from Adam Bushnell. This time, he came in to tell us a story about where we live, and how it has changed over thousands of years. We were all time travellers and we got to see Romans, Saxons, Vikings and more. We couldn’t believe how many different people had come to live in our little corner of the world.
When he came into Class 2, he told us all about how famous the Victorians were for their inventors. We already knew about one of our favourite inventors, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He told us that there were many inventors at the time, and they wanted to design machines to make life better for people. We all pretended to be inventors ourselves, and created some amazing designs for our machines. Then we labelled them so that we could share what they do, how they do it and what powers them. Adam’s design was a cooking robot with so many arms for it to cut, flip, fry, and scramble with. We shared our ideas with the class and some of us were brave enough to stand up in front of the whole school.
In the afternoon, we went back into the hall to find out what the rest of the school had been learning about. Children from all the classes came up and shared their work: Reception had been finding out about different people from the past, and looking at how they dressed differently to how we dress now; Class 3 did some Anglo-Saxon riddles, we all had fun trying to guess what animal they were; we shared our inventions, telling people what we would do as engineers and inventors in the Victorian era; and class 4 did some acting, showing us how dangerous the life of a miner in the North-East could be.
In between each class sharing their work Adam weaved a tale that linked everything together, and we found out that our families are the strongest link to the past that we have. It was such an interesting and fun day, and we all felt very excited to write our information text on Brunel during our English lesson.
