Year 1 Seaside Day

Date: 25th May 2021 @ 5:40pm

Well as the song goes ‘We do like to be beside the seaside’ and if this is not possible then a seaside day at school will suffice! There was great excitement as we gathered in the class today and a marvellous assortment of seaside clothes with plenty of accessories like sun glasses, sunhats, inflatable rings, arm bands, buckets and spades and even a snorkel.

First, we considered the following questions:

• What do we mean by the seaside?
• Why did some places become seaside resorts?
• Which seaside areas do people visit today and why?
• What is a seaside resort like today?

Thank you to all those parents that added photos and interviews to Showbie or brought copies into school because this information, which we shared with class, helped us start to answer some key questions. Next, we explained that while we know a lot about our own experiences of the seaside and can talk about them and share photographs we also need to consider what seaside holidays were like in the past:

• How do we know about something that happened beyond living memory?
• Why did people start going to the seaside at this time?
• How holidays changed over time within the last 100 years.

The morning focused on a carousel of 5 activities to support enquiry, cause and change questions;

1. Using a gallery of seaside posters/photographs /postcards from Victorian times the children used checklists and an i-spy approach to identify common features such as walks on a promenade, donkey rides and Punch and Judy shows.
2. Help Grandma sort her photos. Grandma had dropped her seaside album and all the photos are muddled . We had to sort them into Now (present times)/ when Grandma was a girl (about 50 years ago) and Victorian times (before Grandma was alive) The children then drew what would be packed in a suitcase now and in times gone by.
3. Looking at a Victorian/ Edwardian postcard the children listed the things they could see on these beaches based on what they have seen in photos. They developed their period-specific vocabulary, using words such as parasol, pier and prom. Children then drew and presented the ‘photo’ on the front cover of what would have been seen at the beach.
4. Looking at a Victorian numbered photo the children named the activity by the number and mimed it for a partner to guess. On this station the children were also introduced to Punch and Judy artefacts and started to make a Punch and Judy show as well as trying on a Victorian bathing costume.
5. Why did people go on seaside holidays 100 years ago? Having looked at posters advertising holidays from 100 years ago they Sorted statements into true and not true from the advertising evidence before filling in speech bubbles describing why people went on holiday 100 years ago.

Our afternoon combined forest school activities and our geography focus for the day. In geography we recapped and built on our understanding of human and physical features. We created our own model of the seaside and added things we might find at the beach e.g. beach huts, rock pools, boats and deck chairs. We labelled each item and talked about how we know they are either a human or physical feature. The focus was on explaining how we know it is either physical or manmade (human) rather than just if it is a human or physical feature to share our understanding. You can see pictures of the model we created below.

In forest school we looked at the details and textures of shells and use these to make imprints into clay. We covered our clay models with sand and will bring them home once they are dry. We hope you like them!

A seaside day would not be complete without an ice lolly which we all thoroughly enjoyed! Many thanks once again for your support in making this such a fun and interesting day.

Mrs Pulle and Mrs Lindersen