Thread by @richkbristol

This week we ran a history trip to Chepstow Castle. I spent a long time thinking about effective trips and tried to address these. A 🧵

I think trips can be problematic if:
- they aren't integrated into the curriculum
- kids don't have enough contextual knowledge to understand what they see
- historical thinking is ignored.

So here's what we did...

We framed the day with an enquiry question like we do in class. I spent ages over this reading scholarship to choose one that is actually debated by historians. We ended up with:
What was the purpose of Norman castles?

The day began with an hours lesson on Norman castles. This was packed with the knowledge they'd need to understand the site. We covered phases of castle building and importantly talked a lot about different interpretations and evidence experts used.

All this was before they got on the bus.

Then we went to Chepstow.

At Chepstow we wanted to do two things:

1. Actually do some proper historical thinking about the original Norman bit

2. Enjoy the site!

For the first hour we worked the students hard to get them to engage with the physical features at the site and thinking about what they told us about the purpose of the site. They had four locations to visit with a teacher who got them to think about the physical features.

In the bailey we measured it's size and considered the garrison that could be housed here.

In the keep we thought hard about the windows and why there were none on the Welsh side.

Up on the ramparts we looked at defensive features.

This isn't our history around us site. It's part of the Normans course but we heavily emphasised the features as we wanted to sow seeds for History around us next year.

In the afternoon we purposely built in some time for them to explore. Exploring castles is one of the great joys of history so we gave them time to do so. They loved this. They climbed the towers. They bought swords. 😂

After this we went back to Bristol and purposely built in half an hour at the end of the day to wrap up our learning. Kids sat down and answered the days enquiry question using the physical features they had seen. This was important.

It wasnt a perfect day and there are tweaks we could make but I think this might be the most successful trip I've run. Hence me sharing. Here endeth the 🧵.