St Margaret'sC of E Primary School

In Reception we use ourselves and our family as a starting point for learning about our own personal history. We learn how we have grown and changed since being a baby. We recall family events and celebrations that have hapened in our lifetime and that we can remember.  Using stories as a stimulus we then learn about family events beyond our living memory. For example after reading the story 'When Willy went to the Wedding' by Judith Kerr we looked at old family wedding photos. We talked about how we knew the photos were from the past. We compared them to recent family photos. The children could spot differences in clothes and hairstlyes and of course that very old photos were  black and white and not colourful like we have today. 

Our Geography work on Town Street provides a great foundation to find out about shops from the past, We look at old photos of Town Street and talk about what is the same and what is different. Traditional Tales such as the Elves and the Shoemaker provide the hook to learn more about the past. We learn about what job a cobbler does and this again links with our work on Town Street in Horsforth.   We learn about how life was different in the past by looking at artefacts and thinking about what their purpose was in the past.