Sailing Into Year 5

Bright and early on Monday 7th September, Year 5 set off for the Mary Rose Museum at the Historic Dockyards in Portsmouth. Although the journey was quite long (2 and half hours!), the children were well behaved and spent their time playing, chatting and......eating loads of sweets!! It was a glorious sunny morning in Portsmouth and after a brisk walk we were welcomed at the Education Centre by Mary and Clare and started our first workshop "Henry's Heroes".

We were allowed to hold lots of artefacts which would have been on board ship with the officers and crew in Tudor times - games, books, drinking mugs, maps, money and..... they even all had to carry their own nit comb with them! Finally we all had the chance to dress up, either as a member of the crew or as an officer of the Mary Rose.

Some of us decided we would have liked to have been crew members while lots would have preferred to be officers, although life couldn't have been this much fun in Tudor times!!

After our lunch, we went into the amazing Mary Rose museum - there was just SO much to see everywhere! We enjoyed looking at the cannons and cannon balls, the skeletons - especially Hatch, the dog - the kitchen equipment, the crow's nest, the weapons

.... the list goes on and on BUT the best thing of all was the wreck of the Mary Rose herself!
As we got to the top of the museum, we were even able to try firing the longbows....that took a lot of muscle power!

       Finally, we went to our last workshop called "Gun Drill". Here, we split into teams and had to learn different jobs in order to successfully fire the cannon. We were all really good at our different jobs by the end, but we're not sure we would have liked to do it for real on board the Mary Rose because it was REALLY hard work!

Following our visit to the shop, we started to make our way back to the bus for our long journey home to Wales, tired but happy. We had a FANTASTIC day at the Mary Rose museum and would like to say a huge "diolch yn fawr" to all staff at the museum, especially to Mary and Clare. Also massive thanks to Mr. Collingridge, Mr. Johns and Mrs. McGurk who helped us set sail to the Mary Rose in Portsmouth.