Form III’s Roman Afternoon

On Thursday afternoon, Form III were transported back in time to Ancient Rome!  We were very surprised to see that Mrs Kendall had changed into a Roman toga-wearing lady over lunch!

We had a fun afternoon of learning about different aspects of everyday life for the Romans.

We learnt about Roman banquets and found out about the different types of food that would have been eaten.  We were horrified to learn that dormice were a speciality!  Banquets would last for hours and there would be entertainment laid on between each course.  We had a go at designing our own Roman menus, whilst sampling some of the different foods that would have been available at the time.  We tucked into carrots, cucumber, radishes and celery, followed by dates and apple with honey.  The cucumber and apple went down particularly well and we discovered that radish was certainly an acquired taste!

We also had a go at using some tiny tiles to make our own mosaic patterns, as the Romans would have done.  We carefully chose the colours we wanted and laid them down to create some beautiful patterns on templates.  Some of us combined the tiles with colouring pencil and pen drawn tiles, to create a multi textured piece.

On the carpet, we played with some marbles.  Roman children would have played with marbles (perhaps not as shiny and smooth as ours!) and would invent different games to play with their friends.  We enjoyed trying to roll the smaller marbles as near to the largest marble as possible. It turned into quite tense competition at times!

We also made some dice that had Roman numerals on, instead of the digits we are used to today.  We had to cut the net of the dice out, carefully ensuring we didn’t cut the flaps off as those were important for the final formation of the dice.  We then challenged each other to roll the dice and perform that number of a certain activity, eg, star jumps or squats!

We had a wonderful afternoon and all loved wearing our gold vine leaf head bands!