St John's Black History Day. October 2023

We came together as a whole school to recall the names and key facts of the important people we looked at last year. Each class were then introduced to the key figure from black British history that they would be focussing on today. Children drew comparisons to last year's figures and practised the skills of a historian in lots of different ways. Year 2s compared and contrasted the two athletes: Jesse Owens and Kelly Holmes. Years 3s explored different sources to discover that King Charles II might not have had white skin afterall even though he is depicted this way in most modern history books! Year 4 turned their classroom into a Bioinformatics lab: measuring the bones of Cheddar Man's skeleton to reconstruct what his face might have looked like in 3D by marking this data and his features onto a balloon! Did you know that Next-generation sequencing has informed us that this Stone Age Briton's skin pigmentation was more than likely black, instead of white as the history books often suggest!? Years 5 and 6 also learnt to keep an open mind and explore all the evidence before assuming the skin colour of Ancient Romans and Tudors in Britain.

Alongside this, Mrs Hanna led music sessions where we explored the influential black grime and rap artist - Stormzy - who aims to give black people a voice, but also aims to bring together people of all different skin colours in their communities through the power of music. As a lovely finish to the day, all classes brought together their rehearsed parts to add their layer to the song - 'Blinded by your Grace'. All of the children from Reception to Year 6 had an introduction to rap and the oldest children tried to come up with their own rhyming and lines. 

A busy day with lots of history knowledge which no doubt will stick through all the fun shared and recorded!