1. Survival guide leaflet
Students can create a guide to surviving the Stone Age, filled with writing, drawings and fun facts about how we used to live.
Topics covered might include:
- How to find food
- How to make tools
- How to stay warm
- How to find or build a shelter
The leaflet could also reflect the team-based nature of Stone Age life.
This is a great homework idea to encourage students to put themselves in Stone Age shoes and think through the challenges our ancestors faced.
2. Write about Stone Age animals
Some of the
animals alive in the Stone Age are still alive today. But others are extinct and can seem fantastical to modern eyes.
Cave lions,
woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats and woolly rhinos – all can stir the imagination and inspire drawings, poems or short stories.
Alternatively, you could set students the task of creating fact files about Stone Age animals. What were their defining features, and how are they different from modern animals?
3. Tell a story in cave art
This can be an art activity or a writing exercise.
For art, students can make natural paint from berries, charcoal or chalk. Then they can draw a comic strip or story on brown paper so they look like prehistoric cave paintings. You can provide students with real-life pictorial examples or let them work from their imaginations.
And for writing, you can tie examples of cave art to storytelling. Cave paintings often record everyday events from Stone Age life. Students can be asked to tell the story in words depicted in a cave painting or think up their own.
4. Thinking about Stonehenge
Why was Stonehenge built? What was it for? These two questions alone can be turned into research activities, speculative writing, storytelling exercises and fact sheets about stone as a building material.
There's also a
Stonehenge quiz on the BBC Bitesize website. This tests students on the information provided by the BBC, all of which corresponds to KS2.
5. Design a tool
For hundreds of thousands of years, humans had only stone tools to work with. Ask students to draw and label an axe or spear. What materials would they need to attach the stone to the wooden handle?
If you like, you could turn this design into an actual (safe!) tool when back in the classroom.
You could also get students to watch a short video about flint tools (here's one from the 10,000 Years BC YouTube channel). Give them one or two questions to think about afterwards. For instance, you could ask "What jobs did those tools do?" or "How are they different to tools today?"
6. Dinner is served
Stone Age people ate whatever they could hunt or gather. Their diet was rich in meat, wild plants and roots. Later on, they made nets for catching fish.
You can ask students to write a Stone Age recipe or a menu for a "Stone Age cafe". This will get students thinking about the differences between Stone Age and modern food and drink. What was missing from their diets?
Online resources
