Understanding the Central Chilterns
Supporting local teachers with local studies
Our Teacher Training
Understanding the Chilterns is a project running until 2024, in partnership between Amersham Museum, Wycombe Museum and the Chiltern Conservation Board. Supported by the Heritage Fund and the Ernest Cook Trust, it is offering free hands-on school sessions or virtual sessions with accompanying museum loan boxes for Key Stage 2 children.
The Chilterns landscape has been shaped by human activity over the last 6000 years: from prehistoric monument builders, Roman farmers, medieval brick and tile producers and more recently Victorian chair makers, to name a few examples. This session combines the history and geography themes of landscape, settlement and industry. Reflecting the primary history curriculum’s strong emphasis on chronology and historical enquiry, the children have a chance to investigate real and replica artefacts and ask museum staff questions to gain an understanding of the story of people in time and place in the Chilterns.
The purpose of the project is to inspire the next generation of children to feel a connection with the special qualities of the Central Chilterns landscape and support you in your local curriculum planning.
You can choose either:
- A hands-on classroom session (in-person) at your school with real museum artefacts OR
- A museum loan box, containing real and replica items and suggested activities for use in your classroom
Both would be followed by a Virtual museum classroom follow-up session with a Q&As.
Themes – the session provides a local history overview but there are opportunities for us to adapt to the curriculum topic you are working on – i.e. the Stone Age, Iron Age, Romans or Victorians. As such there are two themes to choose from:
- Theme A – pre-1066 session / loan box: including Stone age, Iron age, Roman and a small number of Anglo-Saxon items OR
- Theme B – post 1066 session / loan box: including Medieval, Tudor and Victorian items
Contact us to find out if your school is eligible for a FREE session. Spaces are limited and will be offered on a first come, first served basis. If you are interested, please get in touch at understandingthechilterns@amershammuseum.org telling us:
- Year group
- Number of children
- Your local history topic that is relevant to the Chilterns
- Some preferred dates for a session – we have some availability this term
- Your preferred option of in person or loan box, and theme – see above
‘The most successful part of the learning experience was providing the children with the opportunity to get hands-on and explore the artefacts, and then placing the artefacts in context during the follow-up virtual session’ Year 3 teacher
OPEN: Chilterns Stories Competition 2022
As part of the Chilterns Stories festival, celebrating tales of the Chilterns AONB, we are inviting KS2 age students from across the Chilterns to write and submit a short story about our precious landscape. The story must meet the following criteria, but otherwise, we want you to be as creative as possible!
Submission guidelines:
-One submission per student
-Submissions should be a minimum of 100 words, but no more than 500
-Submissions should be sent in in Word doc format
Please share with us a story about your favourite place, animal, plant, or experience in the Chilterns.
Entries can be submitted via email to Lizzie Krupa on lkrupa@chilternsaonb.org no later than…
CLOSED: Chilterns Landscape Art Competition 2022
In April 2022, we designed and curated an exhibit to celebrate landscape art of the Chilterns, hosted by Wycombe Museum. As part of this exhibit, schools and individual children from in and around the Central Chilterns were invited to showcase their artistic talent by entering a competition celebrating the Chilterns landscapes through art. They were encouraged to make creative pieces linked to the Chilterns.
Some schools received support from our Education Consultant, helping them to explore how the Chilterns was special and different in the past, where people lived and worked, and what kind of things people did, and made. We were delighted to receive almost 250 entries, 30 of which were selected to be part of the exhibition.
