This week, Year 3 went to Gunnersbury Park Museum to take part in an excellent workshop about surviving the Stone Age.
Our workshop was not until after lunch so we started by exploring the museum. The museum exhibits the history of the local area with a different era of history in each room. Our first job was to find the exhibits that belong to the stone age. It’s amazing to think that here in West London, particularly in the Thames, archaeologists have found stone age tools, axe heads and spear heads etc. It’s believed some of the exhibits date back up to 12,000 years! While searching for the stone age exhibits, we had fun exploring the other rooms which including dressing up in clothing belonging to different eras.
After lunch (which included a visit to the playground just outside the museum!), it was time for the workshop. Our workshop leader gave us the opportunity to show off what we knew about the different eras of the stone age and very kindly shared with us some prehistoric primary sources found in the local area. We each got to touch the actual tooth of a woolly mammoth, found locally so is proof that woolly mammoths roamed the area we live in today!
We then were taken back in time and guided outside into the park, where we were each given our own animal skin. Our first job as hunter gatherers was to hunt a wild boar. We were given some spears made to resemble what a stone age spear probably looked like, and we threw them at a wild boar (well, an image of a wild boar). We can all agree that it was easier for us than our ancestors because this boar couldn’t move!
After taking great satisfaction in hunting our imaginary dinner, we took large branches and sticks along with our animal skins and used them to create a temporary shelter because that’s how people would have lived in the Mesolithic era. Fast forwarding into the Neolithic era, we then practised filling the gaps in a straw roof with wattle and daub because that’s how people built the first permanent homes when farming was discovered.
It was a race to get back to school so we weren’t too late for the parents but it was well worth the journey and we learned a lot about what it takes to survive the stone age!
