History at Biggin Hill Primary School

Posted: Mon 21st Jan 2019

We are delighted to inform you that we have been awarded with the GOLD Quality Mark for History Teaching! Well done to the teachers, children and especially to Miss O’Mahony and Miss O’Neill who have worked so hard to achieve this! This is an article written by two Year 6 students for the local paper:By Neve & Maisie Y6

At Biggin Hill Primary School, we learn about local history, The Romans, The Ancient Greeks, The Vikings, The Victorians, The Ancient Egyptians and many other eras. We do lots of research about famous historical people linking to history as well. For every topic we do, we have a Buzz Day. This is a day filled with exciting activities linking to our topic. This year, when we were learning about slavery, we stepped into the role of slaves for the whole day. We had to do incredibly difficult jobs such as scrubbing the floors with toothbrushes and cutting the grass with scissors. Luckily, we rose up against our cruel overseers (the teachers) and fought for our freedom. We then tied our over seers to the gate to make an example of them and to show that we thought slavery was completely unacceptable!

Additionally, we have a history off the page day which is when we dress up to immerse ourselves in the period of time we are learning about. We spend the whole day learning about life in that time and acting as the people in that time would have done. It is an excellent experience to be in the position of people from these interesting eras. Also, we get the chance to handle real artefacts, try food they would have been eaten and re-enact famous historical events. For our homework, we get interesting tasks about history that help us with our class work; we are able to present this work in any manner we choose. This is good because it allows us to link ICT or art with our history.

In the past, we have gone on many trips to help us with our history learning. We visited places such as: Battle Abbey when learning about the Battle of Hastings, Lewis Castle when learning about the Stone Age; and The RAF Chapel when learning about WW2 and The Battle of Britain. For Remembrance Week, our head teacher (Mr Ellis) and four of our house captains went to lay a wreath of poppies at our local war memorial. All the other children in the school painted poppies on rocks, which were displayed outside the Biggin Hill Memorial Museum.