Year 3 and year 4 visit to Durham University Oriental Museum

Last week the boys in Year 3 and 4 travelled to Durham to visit the university’s Oriental Museum.

As part of their Humanities topic, Ancient Egypt, the boys in Year 3 were given the opportunity to have some real hands-on experience with many of the exhibits the museum offers, from mummification rituals to translating Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics. One of their favourite moments of the trip included the “Journey to the Afterlife”, where they worked together to prepare one of the Year 3 boys for the weighing of the heart ceremony! 

Meanwhile Year 4’s first activity saw the boys working in houses to examine four artefacts from the Shang Dynasty (1600 to 1046BCE).  The boys had to use their investigative skills to work out what each artefact had been used for.  Two bore ancient Chinese script and Oliver M cleverly suggested they were prophecies.  “They were written on pieces of bone or turtle shell which would be thrown into the fire and stabbed with a red hot poker to see where they snapped,” recalled Bertie B. 

Following the archaeology work, the boys went into the Museum and worked in their house groups to complete a ‘gallery trail’ discovering various objects and their uses.  “Most of us were born in the year of the snake,” discovered Henry S, “and some of us were born in the year of the horse.” 

After lunch the boys took part in a workshop all about Shang Dynasty writing.  They learned how to read and write a variety of characters, using their analytical skills to work out the meaning of each symbol.

Finally, everyone participated in an interactive drama, centred around the story of the end of the reign of the last Shang king. “I really enjoyed acting in the play,” commented Kei I. 
We returned to school exhausted with a much greater understanding and enthused to learn even more about these fascinating periods of history. 

It was a fantastic day, and a wonderful way to end our term.