Start Romans on the Tyne

This Northern Grid funded project was carried out by Hedworthfield Primary School in Jarrow Tyne and Wear.

We wanted to create a bank of resources based upon Arbeia Roman Fort in South Shields. We hope that the resources created will be useful in whole class teaching and provide a central resource area for teachers who wish to develop a creative curriculum.

All of these resources have been trialled in the classroom and have been found to be suitable for a range of age groups and abilities. We have put them into word based or powerpoint format so that individual teachers can adapt each resource to meet the needs of the children that they teach.

We have thoroughly enjoyed participating in this project. The children have had an invaluable firsthand experience of collecting evidence, learning about the past and developing their speaking and listening skills. The children took all the photographs and video footage that we have used. We found being able to take digital cameras and video cameras to the site was an excellent way to stimulate and enthuse pupils. We also used digital voice recorders that we took on visits to the site, at first we thought that this would be useful to use when making our resources, however although it was an excellent resource to use with children in the classroom, this did not equate to the quality of the resources that we wished to make. I would thoroughly recommend using voice recorders with children to remind them of the visit or to make creative responses around the site. It is also very useful if you wish to make talking books or other ICT linked resources when you return. We also used other ICT programmes such as crazytalk and Kartouche. These were excellent resources as they inspired creativity and gave lots of opportunities for writing and speaking and listening.

We have included a number of drama and speaking and listening activities as this has been a major focus in our school and we have found that this has impacted on the quality of creative writing from the children as evidenced in our SATs results this year. The drama activities are very simple and can be used without a great deal of props or preparation, and can all be carried out in the classroom with any group of children.

The bank of worksheets and other paper based resources have been used in the classroom with great success. Sometimes as a prompt that led on to more complex and creative work, and other times simply as a good standalone lesson activity. We hope you find these resources useful and that they cut down on your already hectic workload.

We would love to hear from you if you have used any of the resources and whether they were successful or not in your classroom. If you have any great ideas or activities to add to this resource bank, we would be very pleased to include them so that everybody can benefit.

Sarah Patterson, Belinda Simpson, Amanda Hayward and everyone involved in the Romans on the Tyne project.

Email us at info@hedworthfield-pri.s-tyneside.sch.uk

Start Romans on the Tyne