Today, we had an excellent day exploring the River Thames as part of our new Geography topic, rivers.
After a long journey to Chiswick, we finally arrived at Hogarth’s House where we had an indoor workshop about the River Thames. The workshop involved locating the river on a map of the UK, ordering images of the river dating back 3,000 years to the modern day and identifying the features of a river (source, mouth, tributary, meander etc.).
We identified different reasons why people live near rivers (which will be very useful for our next Geography lesson!) – such as hygiene, food and drink, transportation etc – and acted out those reasons. The final task was to gather artefacts which have been collected in the river and to organise them into different categories. There were pipes, shells, bones, tools and pottery to sort, among other items.
After lunch, it was time to embark on the foreshore – the patch of sea bed exposed by the low tide – to explore artefacts and wildlife hiding below the surface of the water. There were strict rules we had to follow because the ground was muddy , slippery and uneven and those of us wearing wellies were able to go into the river itself as long as we didn’t go in further than ankle-deep! We used small nets in the river to find creatures such as freshwater shrimp, leeches and clams. On the foreshore, we found artefacts like pottery, so it would be amazing to find out how old our finds are!
After such an interesting time exploring the bed of the River Thames, the next thing to do was to make sure we washed our hands thoroughly because even though the river is clean, there could still be some harmful bacteria inside. It was another long journey back to school and we unfortunately arrived a little late but it was worth it! Many thanks to Thames Explorer Trust for a fascinating look at our city’s major river!
That looks really fun!