Year 4 had a fantastic day visiting Winchester Cathedral and learnt lots to support their RPE topic on Christian places of worship. They started the day searching for angels in the cathedral. They were surprised by how many different angels there were and thought they were all so beautifully displayed.

They then went to the education centre to learn about gargoyles and grotesques. Great fun was had moulding designing gargoyles and then making them from clay.

Finally they had a guided tour of the cathedral and learnt about the legend of St Swithun and the chaos caused by Cromwell’s men during the civil war.

As you can see they also enjoyed pulling their own grotesque gargoyle faces.

The trip to Winchester Cathedral has subsequently been used as a stimulus, for a cross curricular RS/English piece of work where the children were given a choice: to write a straightforward report of the day, or to imagine they were a time traveller and find themselves at the cathedral in the year that it was consecrated (1093). The guide at the cathedral was excellent at relaying the atmosphere of different events in the cathedral's history, so the children had plenty of material to draw upon to fire their imagination.