This week, in history, we continued our learning about Florence Nightingale. The children sequenced the main events in her life on a timeline, thinking about what she did before, during and after the Crimean War. We discovered that Florence’s achievements went beyond what she did at Scutari hospital and have impacted the nursing profession and hospitals today. The children considered a time when Florence did something to help people and did something remarkable at the time and added these symbols to their timeline. 

We also used drama to explore the following question: What did people think of Florence at the time and how can we find out? We used sources written by a soldier, nurse and doctor at Scutari hospital to investigate what they thought of Florence. We used drama techniques to investigate this further. The children really enjoyed this activity and we also used it as an opportunity to compare the roles of men and women in Florence’s time and now. We linked this to our curriculum driver of equality. 

We had a special visit from D-Side Dave this week who came to talk to us about how to keep our bodies healthy. He also shared important messages around medicines. This included who we should take medicine from, why we might need medicine and where it should be stored.