It sounds like a bad cracker joke but it's just our intro to our topic. There's nothing like starting the new year with pestilence and agonising death.
I like a bit of context with my history, so we started off with a timeline to get a rough feel for where we were parking our history train on the recent-human-history timeline.
Timelines are a bonus as you can cover quite a few historical periods or events while surreptitiously sneaking in some maths with negative numbers and do some cutting and sticking to boot. We cover BC and AD, major and minor ticks and identify our (humbling) little centimetre of our own personal history. Cross curricular link: Maths, number lines.
The boys cut out pictures to represent the major time periods like stone age, middle ages, Tudors, Victorians and so on and stick them on, marking the periods they covered. "Why was the Stone Age so long?" I ask. "There are a lot of stones." Fair enough.
Next lesson, we talk about life in the middle ages and begin to explore the Black Death and how many people in Britain and Europe died. Cross curricular link: European geography.
Lesson 3, we look at causes, creating a flow chart of how the plague spread and talking trade routes and shipping. We explore the ideas people had at the time about the cause (angry God, planets, bad smells) and how the poor were worst hit and why. Cross curricular link: Science, flow charts / RE, beliefs.
Lesson 4 was symptoms. We act out the stages, with apples under our armpits and give ourselves the dreaded black spot.
Lesson 5, on to cures and the bizarre and disgusting ideas (like exploding frogs and dead pigeons) that were popular at the time. Cross curricular link: Science, medicine, germs, hygiene.
We look at persuasive writing in advertising and briefly divert into how humour, glamour, alliteration, rhyme and catchy tunes and slogans can help sell products. Cross curricular link: Literacy. The boys come up with their own crazy cures and design posters to sell their wares. We have a bit of fun with ageing our paper with candles and tea bags. Cross curricular link: Art.
Some persuasive writing tips are to use exaggeration, flattery and to start off with a question. K's opening gambit on his poster is perfect "Have you got the Black Death? Don't worry - the new Black Cream is in town and it will cure you in minutes!"
"Guaranteed to prevent death, or your money back!"
Finally, the short book "The Plague, a cross on the door" about a boy whose master dies from the plague was a perfect round up. Cross curricular link: Literacy, reading and listening.
Next stop in our British history scheme for this term : Tudors...
