Gloucestershire Heritage Hub

Gloucestershire Archives

Passport to the Past revealed

We’ve been running our ‘Passport to the Past’ events for children and families for over a year now and have covered topics from Toys and Games through Police and Crime to Victorian Education. We choose topics based on what we think will be interesting and relevant to children, and which we can support with items from our collections which have the ‘wow’ factor.

As former teachers of History and English & Drama, we try hard to make the sessions as interactive as we can and make sure that everyone can have fun taking part. Our youngest participants are 6 years old and the oldest 11 or 12 – so it’s quite a challenge to make sure everyone feels included.

Here’s a glimpse of our most recent presentations:

May 2022

In May we looked at House History and for this topic we included dwellings of every kind – from caravans and houseboats to country piles. The children had to imagine that they had to make a planning decision about building 10 new homes in a small village. As always, the insights they brought to the topic were surprising and impressive.

June 2022

For the Queen’s big 70th anniversary in June, we had a look at Gloucestershire’s Royal connections - with a special focus on the Tudors. We showed the children the spectacular Royal Charters and asked them to try to write like a Tudor and play a game of Fox and Geese.

   

Coming up: July 2022

Our event for July this year has been inspired by Carers’ Month and to bring it to life for children we have taken the concept of ‘caring’ to include looking after pets, toys and plants. Our collections include lots of lovely Citizen photos of pet shows, police dogs and working horses. There’s also the story of John Daniel, the gorilla who lived with a family near Stroud in the 1920s…

 

So, what’s next?

Now that Covid restrictions seem to finally be coming to an end, we are changing our outreach programme for children and families to include more face-to-face events here at the Archives – including our new monthly programme of surprising Saturday sessions! We’ll still be doing some recorded events, but on a school-termly, rather than a monthly basis.

We may have to respond to popular demand and reprise our roles as Miss Honey and Miss Strict – Victorian School ma’ams. (This video has been viewed over 1000 times).  Watch this space!

Click image to see the video

Kate O’Keefe and Jemma Fowkes June 2022

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