Year 1 Seaside Day

Date: 26th May 2022 @ 4:41pm

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 beach balls, buckets and spades.

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?

Thank you to all those parents that added photos and interviews to Dojo 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 range of 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. 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.
5. Writing postcards from a seaside holiday in the past. This was an opportunity for us to share what we now know would have happened on a seaside holiday. We used this information to write a postcard as though we were on a seaside holiday in the past, taking park in activities such as donkey rides, pomading along the pier and being transported to the water in a swimming machine for a swim.

Our day finished with an ice-lolly before completing our whole school dace through the decades ahead of our jubilee celebrations tomorrow.

Thank you again for your support.

The Year One Team