Monastic Workshop provides hands on learning experience

On Monday, our Year Four pupils enjoyed a very hands-on learning experience in the form of a Monastic Workshop at Worcester Cathedral. The children started the day by proceeding into The Undercroft as monks, where they were provided with a hood and then sworn in.  After a closer look at the map of the Cathedral and the buildings once used by the monks, they descended into the oldest part of the Cathedral called The Crypt, which was built in 1084.

They visited the burial-site of a pilgrim and looked at his boots, which were discovered in 1987. The class imagined what it would be like to pray eight times a day as a monk, and they looked at where they sat. They also managed to see the beautifully intricate carvings underneath the seats.

The children were then given a thorough tour of the Cathedral, including a look at one of the beautiful stained glass windows with the famous pink giraffe! All of the pupils looked at where the monks worked on their manuscripts, ate, and even where they washed their hands. All these were places previously visited by the pupils, unaware of their significance in the past.

After looking at the monks’ herb garden, the children had a go at preparing a scent-bag and learnt about some of the medicines that the monks would have used to cure colds, sore eyes, jaundice and toothache. After learning about what the monks would have written in their manuscripts, they had a go at calligraphy themselves, using feather quills.

In the afternoon we were challenged to complete a giant jigsaw of the three counties’ cathedrals of Worcester, Hereford and Gloucester, as the area looked during the monks time. We learned about all the different roles that monks could take on alongside their daily prayer routines within the monastery, such as cooks, scribes, teachers, and farmers. We also made some early Christian-style jewellery, which would have been influenced by previous Pagan settlers from Anglo Saxon times. We ended the day with a bedtime prayer, which all monks would have recited at the end of their day.