Curriculum
Recently my family and I had the opportunity to explore the beautiful mountainous region surrounding Vladikavkaz in Ossetia. Many years ago, pre-children I read a National Geographic article about the remote ‘City of the Dead’ - our primary reason for visiting.
As you wind through the postcard perfect scenery, there rises on the hill a scattering of ancient necropolises dating back to the 14th century. This is Dargavs, towering tombs built to house the dead, each home to the bodies of a family, the remains still visible as bleached muddled bones. Most of the skeletons inside the tombs date to the Black Death, which decimated 90 percent of the local population. So devastating was the illness, that when people started to show symptoms they made their way to their respective towers and lay inside, awaiting the inevitable.
As you peer inside the open windows to view the entwined skeletal remains, some still covered in shrouds, there are a range of questions that come to mind. As usual, my 5 year old voiced his many endless questions and there I was, able to confidently answer his hows and whys due to the fact The Bubonic Plague was a history topic I’d covered at school two years ago.
It wasn’t only the Black Death I was able to explain. Due to the fact we found ourselves viewing artefacts that had come from beyond the boundaries of the Caucasus and had been incorporated into local traditions, the talk turned to the Silk Road, towns in the gorges on the Georgian border acting as a resting place before moving on to the Middle East. This was a history unit I had covered with my Year 6 and 7 class only the year before.
What we teach in school should be relevant. Regardless of the curriculum being taught, you want students to be able to transfer their skills. By providing them with experiences inside the classroom that are authentic, meaningful and real, they are able to relate these concepts to what they see and do. A few years ago studying The Plague might have seemed irrelevant, a disaster lost to the sands of time, but along comes COVID and all of a sudden you see a clear link as to how we’ve moved on and learned from what came before us.
Right now, in Year 4 and 5 this term, our geography topic is ‘Rivers and Lakes,’ both of which are bountiful in this particular part of the world. Take a trip up into Karelia and the children will be able to explain how these rivers have formed and shape our landscape.
Outside, as winter creeps in, autumnal tones saturate the landscape and our native Russian literature lessons have been exploring this theme through poetry and language devices.
All of this learning was given further credence when our Key Stage 3 students ventured out to Arkhangelsk for a fieldwork trip which didn’t just incorporate the local geography and history, but also literature and science in the form of the “universal man” Mikhail Lomonsov.
Giving children the chance to participate in real events, whether this is using jugs to measure capacity or heating water to see it transform into steam are all part of the normal classroom experience. Discovering bones and climbing the towers in abandoned gorges is another thing entirely, we are made by our experiences and the more we have and the wider the variety, the more rounded we will become.
So apart from adding Dargavs and the surrounding area to your must see bucket list, read up well before the visit or who knows, maybe your elder child’s been paying attention in their history lessons after all.
Miss Herman, Year 4/5 Teacher and Deputy Head.
