The Last Mammoth: reflections on a mantle.

 

I've just finished a mantle with my R/1 class that went a little awry somewhere in the middle, but ended quite successfully this week so I thought it was worth a mention. 

Team.

It took a while to settle on the team of elephant keepers. It may seem a little removed from the Ice Age, but I decided my children needed a concrete, accessible concept to begin with, before learning about the more abstract past. Besides, who doesn't like elephants?

The children created a herd of 6 elephants from junk modelling, learning as they went about the features and adaptations of elephants. They learnt about elephant habitats and diet, as well as the continents they are found on in the wild. We turned the role play area into the elephant keepers' hut and filled it with equipment needed for elephant care; the children watched some YouTube clips of elephant keepers at work to help them with this. 

After a few weeks' work on elephants, all within the context of being elephant keepers, I introduced the client. 

The client.
Well established as expert elephant keepers, the children were approached by an archaeologist. She had been involved in a project in some caves in Russia, and had come across this image.

The cave paintings were around 20,000
years old and the archaeologist wanted
to know whether they depicted elephants. 

The elephant keepers did some research and learnt that there used to be such thing

as a woolly mammoth. They found out more and concluded that the images

were of mammoths, not elephants. They met the archaeologist in the caves in Russia to share with her what they had found out. You can read more about the trip to the cave here. 

The archaeologist was very excited about the thought of woolly  mammoths, but
sad to hear they were extinct. She came up with a good idea.

The commission.

The children were given the task of returning to the Ice Age to rescue the last
woolly mammoth, and bring it to join their herd of elephants. The children were
not sure about this to start with, but eventually agreed to travel back 10,000 years to find a mammoth.

The journey and the learning. 

We did minimal learning about the Ice Age before going to the Ice Age. A mistake I've made before is to try and teach the children too much, out of the story, with not enough drama/tension in the story to keep their interest.  I think an old blog post talks about this a bit more. 

With that in mind, the children learnt a about the Ice Age as the need arose and as they encountered problems in the story.  A lot of different purposeful learning took place -  here are a few examples. 

• A DT lesson on joining and shaping materials when the children made their own time turners. It had been a Year 1 child's suggestion to use time turners to go back in time 'like in Harry Potter' so that's what we did. 
• Looking at images of the Ice Age landscape in order to create a representation of it outside, naming geographical features.
• Creating 'Ice Age Animal Spotting Guides' when our lack of knowledge led to some dramatic encounters with sabre tooth cats (or, as the children called them, 'Tooth Tigers'). 
• Learning about Ice Age weapons and designing their own in order to protect themselves.
• Finding out which natural material would be the most suitable to make a bandage; one of the team had been injured (by a 'tooth tiger', of course) and needed urgent medical attention. 
• Learning about the diet of a hunter-gatherer, in order to persuade a cave man not to kill and eat the last mammoth but instead to eat the fish, berries, nuts, honey and fruits the children gathered for him, which led to...

Completing the commission.

The cave man agreed that the team could have the last mammoth, because they had provided him with clay bowls of delicious food. We discussed how to get the mammoth back to 2022, and the children immediately thought of their time turners. They enacted putting their time turners on the mammoth, we counted down from ten, and, 

"It didn't work!" came the voice of undoubtedly the most dramatically inclined child I have ever taught. 

I let her take the lead. Soon she had every child with one hand on the mammoth and the other on their time turners. She began to chant and they all joined in. We counted down from ten and (thankfully, because I'm not sure what she'd have done next), the mammoth arrived in 2022. 

The children transported it to our elephant enclosure where it quickly settled in. For this particular session, we had started by co-creating a mammoth out of beanbags and other such creative things. 

The end. 

What didn't quite work:

1) the initial investment was not there in the woolly mammoths. I had thought the children would be very excited by the idea of bringing a mammoth into our elephant herd, but there were not. They were more interested in 'tooth tigers' so perhaps I should have changed the course of the mantle. However, this could have led to carnage in the elephant enclosure, so...

2) the idea of time travel. It was a bit abstract I think - there are many ways I could have made it less so, particularly for my 4 year olds, and I will do that next time. 

3) the point of view of the hunter-gatherers. I think we could have done a lot more learning about the life of a family during the Ice Age and I could have worked more on the children's understanding of different view points. 

Having said this, the children were sad to see the end of the mantle and had a lot to say about what they had learnt and enjoyed, so that's all good.