Haffydown had a brilliant day visiting the British School Museum in Hitchin to explore our local history unit – Joseph Lancaster. When we arrived, we were given aprons and caps to put on over our costumes and then we experienced a Monitorial style lesson in the last remaining, original Lancastrian classroom in the world! Mrs Branagan, Miss Heritage and Mrs Davies played the parts of Monitors (the brightest children at school who became ‘mini teachers’) and we sat as pupils, just as local children in the 1800’s used to do. The teacher was very strict! We used chalk and slate to write cursive letters, stood in reading semi circles and learnt how to greet our teacher at the start of the day.
We had to sit very quietly while we wrote letters on our chalk boards. We were not allowed to ask anything about our lesson or talk to each other at all! We practised letters in a tray with sand before we were allowed quills to write on paper with, as we followed the old fashioned handwriting script. We handled very old artefacts and learnt about the social classes of the 1800’s. We visited the Headmasters house, the Victorian Gallery classroom, had drill (Victorian P.E. lesson) and then got to visit the gift shop! We had such a fun day and loved feeling History come to life…even though we were all scared of being locked in the cages that used hang from the ceilings with naughty children inside! We spotted all the features of the classroom that we had learnt about in History (the high ceilings and windows, long benches, monitor desks, semi circles on the floor, the Master’s desk, reading scrolls on the walls, prize hoops) and impressed the museum staff with our questions.
