Getting young children to develop a sense of period and an awareness of how different the distant past was to the present is never easy- a bit like picking up mercury with a fork. One second you think they’ve got it, then its gone. The problem has been with us for years and years. But what of the solution? Well the best we can do is to plan for meaningful revisiting of the ideas by way of motivating task. As always these tasks are so much more successful if nested in context-in this case the example is drawn from our topic on ‘Spreading the word’ with a focus on Caxton and Bell.
Basically there are two simple activities. The first asks pupils to spot 7 anachronistic objects that would not have been known to Caxton and his contemporaries. The answers are animated for you on the PowerPoint on slide 3. This activity is consolidated by the second in which children have to find 4 things they DID use at the time. Simple, but effective.
