stone age drama ideas?

[primarynoodle]

for year 3, trying to tie in history through drama with neolithic era really but any ideas would help!

Do the old 'Create a modern day character who is going time travelling to XXX era'

Set out chairs like a bus and do some improv of what they might see while they're on the bus- perhaps introduce a few scenarios.

Work out who would be brave enough to leave said bus and work out how they would communicate with Neolithic man. Consider Neolithic man's reaction to the bus arriving etc.

Works for all eras. Usually quite amusing.

The Neolithic (new stone age) is really interesting. You have the invention of farming, pottery and probably the wheel!

In the late Neolithic you have the discovery of precious metals copper and gold and their fashioning into status objects, found in cemeteries, and stone monuments (indicating the emergence of stratified society).

Avoid gender stereotyping though, I beg of you.

I think you might have fun with the tensions of early sedentary life - the first villages, in effect. I've always wondered about early toilets...

My job-share partner and I have just done this. We do lots of imaginative enquiry along the lines of mantle of the expert. I'm not sure if this is something you're familiar with. Its quite complicated to explain here but I can try if it's something you'd be interested in? I'll give you a brief outline.

We're lucky that there's a Neolithic site fairly close to us which is now a tourist attraction. We started with the idea that English heritage were worried as no one was visiting it any more. In role, the manager of the site came to ask us (the children) to help since we were experts at creating museum exhibitions. The brief was to create an exhibition to attract more visitors.

We then stepped into a story (in our imaginations) that involved bones that had been found in a deep pit when archaeologists had been excavating. (We'd done lots of front loading about the work of archaeologists so the children were comfortable with that) The bones had markings on that we're unexplained. We wondered whether these findings might have a story that was interesting enough to include in our exhibition

Then basically we stepped back in time and found out about the bones that were there (we also covered some of the science curriculum alongside this about he skeleton). We heard about the leader of the tribe and some stories that were told and we found out about hunting, weaponry, early settlements and diet, prehistoric animals and how to keep warm, all within the story.

We wrote warning stories as part of our literacy and also had a visitor into school who showed the children lots of Stone Age artefacts.

I was worried about doing the Stone Age with year 3 but actually they coped fabulously and loved the imaginative enquiry.

That wasn't very brief in the end! Sorry!

yes mantle of the expert I am familiar with, thats a fab idea! our science topic is plants so neolithic is good to tie that in too.

what do you mean by gender stereotypes?

We had a group cone to school who did a piece on 'stig of the dump' and got the children to join in, they loved it and we used the book as our class reading book.