Visit to Verulamium

On Monday 5 June 2017 we went to St Albans to visit the museum on the site of the Roman city of Verulamium as we are learning about Roman Britain in our history lessons.  We learnt about the Celtic people who lived in Verulamium before the Romans came and how their lives changed with the Roman invasion.

Exploring the Museum we learnt about different areas of Roman life in Verulamium.  In their spare time Romans played board games, watched gladiator fights and visited the theatre.  They worked as metalworkers and there were workshops making glass objects.  They also worked as builders, making buildings to live in and for the gladiators to fight in.  There was a market to supply the town.

We had a workshop, in which we dressed up as rich and poor Romans and we pretended to go shopping for food, clothing and other Roman items from a shopping list – so we had to work out what the items might have looked like in Roman times.  We learnt that poor children’s clothes were plain, but rich people’s might be patterned.  We learnt that boys had a chance to be better educated than girls, they also had two names but girls only had one which was based on their father’s name.  Boys’ names ended –us and girls’ names ended with an –a.

The Romans built a huge wall around the city to protect it and we visited the remains of the wall.  We also visited the remains of a villa with a hypercaust.  This is an underfloor heating system.  A fire was used to warm air that was channelled underneath the floor so the warmth rose up and heated the building.

Year 3