Educational visit to St. Alban's Cathedral
On Wednesday 6h February, Year 4 went on an educational visit to St.Alban’s Cathedral.
A child from 4K wrote:
St. Alban’s is a holy church where there are fun activities to do. There are prayers every hour. Children get to do many things such as make Roman mosaics, role play the life of St. Alban and more!
Mosaics are really fun to make but are also quite complicated. You use little tiles and grout to stick the tiles on. Things will get messy!
When you are role playing, you don’t have to worry, because everyone gets a part. We acted out the story - there was a priest, not any ordinary priest, a Christian one. As you know the magistrate didn’t allow Catholic priests to come in to the town, so, the priest snuck in and spoke to the citizens of the city. Soon, the soldiers were searching the whole city for the priest while Alban and the priest were chatting away. Alban decided to switch clothes with the priest to protect him. So they did. Not long after, Alban was executed. People prayed for Alban because he saved the priest’s life. He was a martyr. St. Alban became a saint.
A child from 4W wrote:
When we got into class we were sorted into partners. We were then put into other groups for when got to St.Albans. Once we had done that, we walked out of school and got on to the coach. We sat with our partners and sung the songs we were doing in Enfield Sings. When we had arrived at our destination, we went into the cathedral.W
e got into our groups and sat in a circle around some objects covered in sheets. Our instructor lifted the covers of the objects and revealed to us some armour, a helmet, a small dagger-like sword, sandals and a shield. He told us the armour was called a lorica segmentata and the shield was called a scutum. The sword was called a gladius. These were all in Latin, the roman language. We acted out the story of St. Alban and how he saved a priest, became a catholic, was executed and then his bones were put in a shrine. We learnt that Alban saved a priest called Amphibalus and King Offa was told in a dream that he was to build a box and put Alban’s bones in it.
Finally we learnt about mosaics. We learnt that mosaics were never perfect because the romans didn’t want to upset the gods. This was because only the gods were perfect. We made mosaics using tiles and grout. We had a really good day.