The National Archives

For this weeks session we took a trip to The National Archives to meet the clients who are part of the Education Department there and who are the people that set us the live brief. While we were there we also participated in one of their educational workshops entitled 'What is History?' for which the activity book we produce will be a follow-on from this workshop. It was really insightful to see how they ran their workshop and it really helped me to understand how they prefer for the children to learn. From the session I realised that investigation and group work were strong components of their teaching method, so I realised that this is something I should carry across into the follow up activity book. It was also amazing to see the archives themselves, seeing where all the historical documents were kept, it made it clear why the staff who had set us the brief were so passionate about teaching young children about history. Plus, you can tell why they were particularly passionate as they have such a vast about of documents to use as resources right at there finger tips. Following the trip to the archives it instilled me with a lot of motivation for the brief and filled me many with possible ideas.