This term Year 4 have been reading a book called ‘The Titanic Detective Agency’ by Lindsay Littleson which tells the real story of children who were on The Titanic. The children have worked together to build a scale model of the Titanic and she is now sailing through the class. Suspended from her keel there are waves and fishes which contain interesting facts. The children used a variety of research materials to find the exact measurements of the ship and they then applied their maths skills to scale the measurements to size. Whilst doing this they realised some of the measurements online were incorrect and so further research found the original blue prints of the ship. We also wrote to the Titanic Museum in Belfast and the Sea City Museum in Southampton to ask for their help. The curators were super helpful and through this Sea City Southampton offered us an online class lesson which all three classes participated in. This involved five different activities; looking at real artefacts from the Titanic and guessing what their use was, participating in a ‘True/False’ activity where they were given facts and they had to decide which were true and which were false, listening to the real survival story about Violet Jessop, one of the Stewardesses, and a question answers session where the children submitted their questions and the curator answered. We submitted so many questions that there were too many to be answered on the day so we await the answers by email! The children were also introduced to Morse Code with Bea tapping out messages. They had to decipher the final message sent prior to the collision and collectively shout out the answer. The final activity involved the children deciding from a given selection of passengers who would be allowed into the lifeboat and who would be left to die. They were given limited details on which to base their decision. There were some pretty heated discussions about this! The curator, Bea Honeycombe -Foster was immensely impressed by the standard of questions submitted by our children, their knowledge of Titanic and their behaviour. We were the first school from Germany to ever participate in these sessions!- RC
