This session was all about activities relating to Medieval monks and life in a monastery.

The children played Top Trump Monks, working out the different jobs in  a monastery and who was more important.  They learnt about the History of Abingdon Abbey with a Dragons and Ladders gameboard designed for a recent Heritage Lottery Funded project.  You can download these games here.

The children also got to design their own illuminated letter like the ones in Medieval manuscripts. While anyone who got a bit bored could test their nose and investigate what herbs and flowers were used for making medicine at that time.

Apologies for the gap in our posts. Normal service has resumed.

In our January 2012 session we did a variety of World War II related activities.  Sarah Phillips, Learning and Access Officer from Wessex Archaeology brought along some of the resources created by their Coastal and Marine department on World War II.

A PowerPoint presentation proved that the children knew a lot more about World War II than Sarah, and we had a great discussion session on the “Archaeology” of the war – in other words, what remains today and what stories can it tell us about the past and what it was like to live in Britain at that time.

We talked about World War II finds discovered by industries working at sea on the seafloor, such as fragments of aicraft wrecks, bullets and guns.  We examined geophysical survey image of WWII wrecks on the seabed such a sunken German submarine, which is located off the South Coast of Britain. We also talked about anti-aicraft blocks, pillboxes, mulberry harbours, decoy towns, maunsell towers and lots, lots more.  We nearly ran out of time for the actual activities.

The activities included dressing up in a real World War II airman’s uniform and exploring what the clothes could tell us about the experience of being in a WWII bomber plane.

We decoded enigma codes and identified the location of enemy and ally ships in an adapted version of Battleship.

Lastly we adapted domestic ships and boast for service in the navy and readied them for battle.

The day was alot of fun and this is obviously a topic that the YAC finds interesting.

Resources used on the day can be downloaded from Wessex Archaeology’s webpages.

The July session, (ok, it was actually in June) saw us take a trip to Old Sarum.

We had two activities organised, one was to use some surveying techniques to carry out a survey of the Old Cathedral and the other was to do some landscape archaeology by walking around the perimeter of Old Sarum and having a look at what else we could see.

Everyone got to do both activities and it was nice to be out in the summer sun!