The Romans Blog by Carol Allen, John Galloway and Jo Dilworth
There are many resources within LGfL that will support you teach your learners about the Romans in an engaging and inclusive way. We have hand picked a few to help you get started.
- Why not use The Roman Pastimes symbol based book created by Widgit Software, one of a set of 6 simple books about the Romans, each created for 5 different levels of reader? This book focusses on many diverse areas of Roman lives that learners may be motivated by e.g. leisure and gladiators. All of the Widgit books are very inclusive as many history reference books have very busy pages with text and graphics inter woven. These books contain simple sentences and pictures, with each covering a separate topic. Each book has relevant vocabulary cards at the back.
- Within the multisensory and highly visual cross curricular resource, Busy Things, there are a range of structured writing frame activities on the Romans for children working at lower literacy levels. To fit in with the theme of Roman Pastimes, we suggest the Gladiators and Entertainment sheet, but any of these can be used to scaffold writing for learners.
- Audio Network includes a vast range of professionally recorded music tracks. For this topic, we suggest downloading the Gladiators music and March Imperial. These tracks can be used to immerse learners in the topic, for musical reference, for physical marching activities (to support cross curricular links and PE) or as a sound track for own video and animation.
- The Romans In London resource is extremely rich in multimedia and excellent resources. It includes particularly motivating visual resources which may appeal to learners with SEND include the top trump style cards sets based on gladiators. The cross curricular top cards may appeal to learners with collecting habits, includes opportunities for competition and turn taking, enables learners to read for information in a motivating way and includes many maths activity opportunities. Multimedia including images and videos of Roman everyday items and dress also make other areas of Roman life accessible and enables historical references. Viewing images and videos of Roman dress would be a great springboard for an engaging, practical activity in your classroom as young people could dress in Roman outfits (i.e. sheets and towels!).Young people can see how Romans dressed using these resources before dressing up themselves and perhaps doing Roman dress labelling activities from Busy Things.
- This E2BN resource shows Roman recipes to help you really engage learners with the smells and tastes of Roman life through multisensory teaching. Images of Roman food and Roman cooking and eating utensils (via romans.lgfl.net) can be used as starters before making Roman food which would have many cross curricular links including DT and literacy.