Introduction
This multi-faceted enquiry ranges from scene-setting story telling, and making deductions (using the strategies Zones of Inference and Prove it!), through to creative uses of evidence with Call My Bluff and Curator’s dilemma. At the heart is pupils asking and answering, historical questions showing an ability to analyse logically and think imaginatively. Image of statue of the Maya Maize God © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Learning objectives
- Pupils learn how to raise valid historical questions and to make inferences beyond the literal.
- Pupils grasp that we learn from: Present day Maya peoples as well as
– Archaeological remains
– Spanish Conquest sources
– Artefacts and hieroglyphs
– Oral tradition - Pupils use their contextual knowledge of Mayan life to make plausible suggestions as to possible uses of mystery objects.
- They learn how to make deductions about the purpose of an object from its physical clues.
- Pupils understand that we have been able to decipher their glyphs only since the 1960s and there is still much we don’t know.
- Pupils grasp that much of the Mayan’s history was destroyed by the Spanish when they conquered this area in 16Cth, including most books and many buildings because they wanted to
