Holiday Souvenirs
This lesson plan looks at objects from the collection at South Shields Museum, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums and can assist you to make a mini local museum in school. South Shields Museum houses a typical local museum collection with a wide variety of objects, some special, some ordinary, that relate to the local area and it's history.
Key Stage:
KS1 History National Curriculum History 'Pupils should be taught about... changes within living memory'Overview:
Use this lesson plan to kick start the creation of an exhibition of objets collected from home about holidays past and present.Suggested Classroom Activity
Show the children the short film ‘What We Have Found Out’. The pupils in the film are KS2, and the curator's answers are pitched at their level - you may want to pause to check pupils’ understanding.
Ask the class if they can think of any things they have brought back from a holiday.
Create an exhibition
Ask the group how, without going online, and without spending any money, they could create an exhibition in the classroom of souvenirs from holidays taken over the past 60 years.
Follow or steer their responses towards a plan of interviewing relatives, or other trusted adults they know, about holidays they have been on and ask if they would mind lending any holiday souvenirs they still have.
Create an exhibition cont..
Children can be allocated jobs: interviewing relations about the object; writing captions about object in the new collection; creating a time-line of the objects; writing a brochure for the exhibition; or being interviewed about the exhibition as the South Shields curator was in our short film.
Analysing the collection
Depending on the objects loaned, it may be possible to cover a number of additional learning activities, for example; there may be a wide range of materials used to make the souvenirs and the children may be able to sort them accordingly. They may be able to identify those materials that have remained in use over the past 60 years and others that are no longer common.
Development Activity:
You may be able to either visit a local museum to talk to a curator about how she/he organises a small scale exhibition, or invite a curator into school.
The local paper, if you still have one, would be likely to be interested and may well agree to interview some of the children.
Learning Objectives:
Children will know and be able to talk confidently about some changes within living memory.
Research, Notes and Links:
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