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Primary Schools
The display is based on castles and castle life. With the basic premise being that we need to hire some staff to come and work in the Castle. They can learn about arms & armour, food, medicine and clothing. The display is designed to be very hands on so that every child will have a go at all the activities. Age group: Keystage One, 5 - 7 year olds Display time: 1 hour 10 minutes (can be adjusted slightly to suit) Max number of students: Will vary depending on the size of the school and the hours in your school day. Please enquire. Number of displays per school day: 3 maximum Minimum number of teachers required: 3 Display area: School hall, dining room, gym or other large indoor space Teacher requirement: At least 3 capable adults present to assist where needed and be present at all times. At least two of which must be teachers. Parents are also welcomed. As the display is so hands on, we will be require your help to assist DM staff in running these displays & pointing things out to the students. Introduction: We introduce ourselves to the children and explain that we need to employ some people to come and work in our castle. We need knights, millers, kitchen hands, physicians (doctors) and of course the students are all very strangely dressed so we'll need to show them what they'd have to wear as medieval people. The children are then split into groups. The number of groups depends on the total number of students you wish to take part in the displays.
Armour: We show the children all our small armour and a few swords. We tell them how and why the armour was worn and where it was worn on the body. We will explain that we will be needing some new soldiers and we will need to see if they know how to put armour on. The students can then try on the pieces of armour. We then get them to rebuild the armour and place the pieces where they think it should go.
There will also be a medieval butter churn in which they can try to make some butter (hopefully we should have some by the end of the session with their joint efforts!). The churn just involves a simple up and down action so is easy to supervise.
This display is a little messy but aprons are provided for this purpose and we will clean up afterwards! Summary: For the last 5 or ten minutes we bring the children back to sit in one group and thank them for helping us and find out what tasks they've enjoyed doing the most and which ones they might like to do as a job and see what they have remembered from the session. Everyone gets a chance to examine the butter and flour that they've made. If you are interested, please drop Karen a line to enquire: Please replace (at) with the @ symbol if you wish to e-mail us. Tel: 07910 264735 e-mail: karen(at)discoveringmedieval.co.uk
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After our success at Key Stage 3 and GCSE, Discovering Medieval have decided to venture in to giving displays for primary schools and we have designed a new display especially for younger primary school students. 
Clothing: There will be a box of medieval child sized clothes, shoes & hats. We show them the different materials that the clothes are made from and the different types of material such as linen (and the flax it is made from), silk, velvet and wool. The children are then given a short talk about what the clothes were made from and how they were worn. Did they know that medieval people didn't have pockets, nobody had invented pockets yet so everyone wore a belt with a pouch to keep all their bits and pieces in. All the clothes were made by hand as they had no machines. Students are then invited to try the clothes on over their normal clothes. 
Physician: Our young trainee physicians will need to diagnose what is wrong with their patients by looking at the colour of their urine ( apple juice or tea used etc). The children will then be given 4 specially made simplified urine charts which are easy to read. We then get the children to diagnose from the urine what might be wrong with the patient they have been given the sample for. Once they have done this they will need to make up a medicine to cure the patient so we hand them each a pestle and mortar and some bowls of kitchen herbs. They then need to mix up a simple medicine from herbs to cure the patients. There will be other medical props on hand to show the students such as a replica of a real physicians book, tooth and arrow pullers and other items of interest. 
Kitchen hands : The cook needs some help in the kitchen so we will need some people to help her do some jobs. Each student will be handed a little apron to wear to protect clothing (and for teachers too). We will have a working quern stone set up with some grain for them to grind into flour. There's lots of different types of grain on display and different flours to feel. We show them how they made flour and then they can have a go at making the flour themselves. Teachers may keep some flour to display in the classroom if you wish. Students are often very proud of their work. 
We will also have on display some of our fake food and tableware set out on display and some medieval cooking items such as a fire (unlit obviously!), cauldron, ladles etc. We find that the children like to pretend that they are really cooking the fake food on the fire which they are most welcome to do. It's all about learning through playing! 
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