Daffodils trip to Shrewsbury

To complete our topic on Charles Darwin, we visited the Shrewsbury museum to discover more. We began our trip by studying the old market hall and looking at the buildings surrounding the square. We tried to imagine what Shrewsbury might have looked like when Charles Darwin was living there.

When we arrived at the museum we were met by Hannah, the museum curator. She took us to the Charles Darwin section and talked to us about Charles Darwin's childhood in Shrewsbury.

She then told us about how Charles liked to collect lots of different things from nature and sort them. So she set us the challenge to hunt for fossils, shells, beetles, insects and rocks. We then worked in our groups to sort them into categories.

We then had the opportunity to look at some of the collection of Charles Darwin artefacts and learn more about extinction. We discovered more about how Charles Darwin had written about how animals evolve and change.

To understand the passing of time and the chronology of Charles Darwin's life, we created a time line with Hannah. We placed objects that represented a significant part of his life. We placed a picture of the plans for his home in Frankwell to represent his birth and childhood, a chalk board to represent going to school in Shrewsbury, lots of shells, fossils, collection of butterflies, to represent his love of nature and discovering, the book he wrote called The Origin of Species, then to end our timeline, a picture of the statue of Charles Darwin outside of the library (which we saw on our journey into Shrewsbury) to represent how we remember Charles Darwin now.

To really imagine what it would have been like to be Charles Darwin, we used ink and quills to draw pictures of things Charles would have seen and collected. Hannah explained that Charles made lots of drawings to record what he had seen on his voyage.

To end our wonderful Charles Darwin trip, we were extremely lucky to be able to visit Charles Darwin's childhood home, The Mount, in Frankwell. The house is beginning to be restored to how it would have looked when Charles would have lived there. We went into the dining room and then climbed the grand stair case to the room in which Charles was born. We then made our way down the narrow servants stair case back to the entrance hall where a statue of Charles stood as a young explorer. The owner has asked us to come up with some ideas for him to use when he opens the house to other schools.
How lucky we are to be the first school to visit?!