'Games from the past, present and future!'
Summer Term 2023
“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
Project Goal/ Question: How have games and toys changed for children over history and what will they look like in the future?
Steps to Success
Step 1 - To compare toys from the past and present.
Step 2 - To understand how and why toys have changed over time.
Step 3 - To design our own toys and games of the future.
Project Aims
This projects aims to support the Kind Tigers in understanding how toys and games have changed over time by looking at their own toys, their parents’ toys and then their grandparents’ toys and identifying differences.
We will share knowledge of old and new toys with others by creating our own historical museum to share with our school community. In doing this we will explore our historical questioning and enquiry skills by researching, using historical sources, developing a sense of chronology and communicating our findings.
We will begin to understand how technology is being used to create the games of the future and begin to imagine and develop our design skills when considering games of the future.
Introduction
We began our new project by looking at the oil painting 'Children's Games' by Pieter Bruegel, a Flemish renaissance artist. This painting depicts a whole host of children playing different games and toys. We discussed what games we could see and recognise and then used the ipads to re-create some of the scenes by taking pictures.
What would we like to find out about games and toys from the past?
This week we discussed what we would like to learning during our next project. We then used these ideas to inform our project goals and steps.
'Who invented Ludo?'
'Who first played football?'
'Why was chess invented?'
'Which games involve gems?'
'Who invented snakes and ladders?'
'When did children first play games like tag and stuck-in-the-mud?'
When then considered what the term 'history' meant and discussed events that have occured in the 'past', what is happening in the 'present' and what the 'future' means. We collected games and toys that we enjoy playing and decided whether these games or toys are from past or from the present day.
19th May 2023
Step 1 - To compare toys from the past and present.
Over the last couple of weeks the Kind Tigers have been fully immersed in exploring games and toys from the past. We used some fantastic descriptive adjectives to describe some of Lily's old toys and discussed what they might be able to tell us about the past. We used the language 'past' and 'present' to compare old and new toys and found out more using information books.
We learnt more about the role of an archaeologist and considered what artefacts can tell us about life many years ago. We then become archaeologists ourselves, digging up a host of toys in our sandpit. We discussed what we thought these toys might tell us about the past and what clues about them indicted how old they were.
The Kind Tigers created their own historical timeline outside and worked hard to learn more about these toys and plot when children had began to play with these toys throughout history. We were particularly interested to learn more about the moon landing in 1969 and the fact that after that lots of children wanted to play with astronaut toys. We also learnt that once televisions were more widely available in homes in the 1960s, children's toys reflected the programmes of the day.
Friday 9th June
Step 2 - To understand how and why toys have changed over time.
Over the last few weeks the Kind Tigers have enjoyed immersing themselves further into the past by continuing to build an understanding of how and why toys have changed over time.
Lots of our friends have been kind enough to bring in special toys and games that were once loved by their parents, aunties and uncles and even grandparents and great-grandparents! It has been fascinating to compare these toys to those we play with now.
Over the half-term break the Kind Tigers were busy interviewing different family members to find out more about toys from the past. We have enjoyed listening to all that we have discovered through this first-hand research. We were surprised to find out that you could often buy toys for under 10p! We have been continuing to plot different events on our class timeline and have developed our understanding of vocabulary such as 'chronology', 'living memory', 'decade' and 'century'.
We have been getting creative by making our own toy cars and ensuring that they move effectively. The Kind Tigers have also been building our own 'toy museum' and labelling different toys we have collected.
Looking forward to our exhibition at the end of the term we have begun to think about features of an effective and interesting museum. We watched videos of museums we have visited in London and around the UK and identified features such as 'artefacts', 'multi-sensory displays', 'labels', 'questions' and 'timelines' that helped us learn more about the objects inside a museum.
Over the coming weeks we will be working in groups to create our own museums to exhibit our learning about toys from the past, present and future!
Friday 30th June
Step 2 - To understand how and why toys have changed over time.
Over the last few weeks we have been continuing to delve into the world of toys and games from the past. We have been investigating different types of sources. These included primary sources (first hand evidence) such as letters and artefacts and secondary sources (second-hand information) such as newspaper articles and non-fiction books. The Kind Tigers enjoyed looking at a newspaper article advertising toys from 1917! We then looked carefully at how to find information using the search engine, Google, as well as finding specific information using contents pages in books.
We then worked in smaller groups to plan and assign roles to create different exhibitions at our museum. The three groups decided to focus on, 'football from the past', 'figurines' and 'spinning toys'. We created our own timelines to display key events occurring in the history of that toy.
Across the last couple of weeks we have enjoyed creating our own saltdough toys, spoon puppets and 'Guess My Toy' riddles, all ready to display in our musuem exhibtion on Friday 7th. We look forward to showing you around our musuem and immersing you in all our learning!
Friday 7th July
Our Museum Exhibition
Over the last few weeks the Kind Tigers have been working tirelessly to ensure our museum exhibition was open for business on Friday 7th July. We worked together to create our display, artefacts and multi-sensory exhibits, including talking voice boxes! We made museum lanyards, a puppet theatre and signs to ensure our museum was eye-catching and informative.
On Friday we enjoyed sharing this museum with our family and friends; passionately describing all that we had learnt and discovered during this project.
Thank you all for your support to make this day and the end of our project such a success!
