Historical Heroes – Art and History!

We have had such a busy week to the start of our new term in Year 2! We were all really excited to begin our new topic, and have high hopes for what we’ll learn! In our previous topic of London, we learnt so much about the Great Fire of London and really enjoyed the chance to visit the Tower of London. We developed our knowledge of historical language such as primary and secondary sources of information, and we showed that we can use these to understand more about the past. We hope to use these skills in our new topic, as we begin to learn more about historical individuals that have made such a difference to the world.

We started this topic by considering what a hero actually is. As a class, we decided that a hero is usually somebody that helps others. We know of some heroes from films, and they usually fly or have superpowers but we know that there are lots of people throughout history that have helped others without having super-human strength. We came up with great adjectives to describe what heroes are like – brave, powerful, strong, heroic, smart… the list goes on!

We later learnt about the work of Andy Warhol, an American artist that was made famous for his Pop Art. We learnt that the term ‘pop’ is short for popular, which means well-liked! As a class, we looked at a few examples of his work, such as his image of Marilyn Monroe. We found out that he had been able to create this using an artistic technique called ‘printing’. This is when you move an image from one surface to another. We looked at our success criteria for printing, and we knew that we would have to press, roll or stamp our image to be able to create a print. We used Styrofoam to make our image that would be repeated. We used our chosen adjective for a hero, and had to make sure that our Styrofoam was carved into carefully and properly so that it could create a perfect print. Our words were actually back-to-front and the wrong way round but we soon realised that it had to be this way so that our print would make sense.

Once we had done this, we had to cover it with coloured paint, using a roller. We then took our Styrofoam and carefully placed it onto card, pressing and rubbing down on it, hoping that when we lifted it back up, our word would pop through the colour perfectly! We had some mixed results to begin with but we learnt that less paint was actually better for this, and lots of us showed great determination and resilience. We also helped our friends by holding their paper so that our print didn’t slip! We moved around the Creativity Room, going to different coloured stations, which we would add to our Styrofoam (once we had patted off the previous colour!) and repeat our print, using a new colour. We are really proud of the work that we did! It also gave us the chance to reflect and think about what we might do differently if we were to do this activity again.

We have also begun our learning about our first hero – Florence Nightingale. We have been excited to learn about her since we saw last year’s assembly about her! We watched a short video that explained her life and impact, and we were shocked to find out about the conditions of the hospital during the Crimean War. We started to discuss her early life and the things that led to her succeeding as a nurse. We were all quite shocked to find out that nursing was not considered to be a good profession 200 years ago. We also learnt that education was very different then, and we all said that we feel very lucky to be able to come to school and learn new things because people in Florence Nightingale’s time (especially girls!) were not as fortunate as we are today. We learnt about the fact that her and her team of nurses were dedicated to properly cleaning the hospital to make sure that injured soldiers were not getting more poorly from the lack of cleanliness and poor hygiene. From here, Florence and other nurses could properly look after those that were injured and they started to make full recoveries. We started to create a fact-file of information about Florence Nightingale, separating what we know about her into three main sections – her early life, the Crimean War, and her Return to Britain and the impact that her work had. We have really enjoyed the start of this topic, and we can’t wait to find out more about our historical heroes!