Welwyn Garden City: an ideal place to live?

Older KS2 School Workshop

Workshop

As part of the National Lottery Heritage Fund project to celebrate the centenary of Welwyn Garden City we at HALS have created a FREE workshop to all Welwyn Garden City Schools with KS2 students. Our workshop aims to inspire engagement with the garden city ethos and explore the relevance of garden cities today. This workshop supports the delivery of national curriculum subjects including history, English, and SMSC.

Latest Update January 2021

Due to the most current government restrictions on movement and school closures we have once again amended our delivery mode for this workshop. The workshop is now delivered in a homeschooling format with access to a private YouTube video with an accompanying worksheet. There is still an after workshop assignment for students to complete. This format is currently available for delivery until March 31st. If you are a KS2 teacher in the Welwyn Garden City area and are interested in signing your class up for this workshop please complete the booking form below and send it to us at HALS.

Some examples from Applecroft  year 3

Thank you so much Applecroft year 3 students for participating in the workshop online via the remote YouTube modality. I hope everyone learned a lot about Welwyn Garden City and had fun making some new advertisements for the city today.

Remote Delivery September 2020

We are now offering the workshop remotely (via MS Teams). The session will last approximately 1 hour and have the following format: live presentation exploring the defining features of a garden city, looking together at archive material relating to life, work and leisure in WGC.  Finally we will be thinking about the legacy of garden cities today.   There is a follow up activity to create a poster/radio advert/TV commercial for WGC.  We plan to check back in to see the children present and discuss their promos. We have also extended our project, so we can now take bookings from September 2020  until 12 February 2021.   We don’t yet know when it will be safe to re-open for groups, or deliver the session in your classroom, but we can review this at a later date.

POST COVID UPDATE

In September 2020 we delivered our first of many online workshops. Our first class to experience the online digital delivery was Mr. Clive Anstey’s year 5 class from Welwyn St. Mary’s Primary School. The workshop took just over an hour with a lot of great interactive questions and activities including true/false questions, archive photos and maps, class mind mapping, and several questions from the class. At the end we left the class with a post workshop activity to design their own advertisements for Welwyn Garden City and here are their posters. Thanks year 5, GREAT WORK!

Pilot Session

The workshop started with a wonderful pilot session on November 18, 2019 for Oaklands Primary School. The class of 30 children boarded a coach and rode over to the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS) building for their workshop session located at County Hall. The class was divided into 3 smaller groups where students got a first-hand look at the actual archives and where they are stored. The onsite workshop lasted about three hours with an interactive presentation with our HALS Learning & Access Officer inside of our reading room. We had a power point presentation and some of the original documents from Ebenezer Howard and original photographs from our archive were made available to view. The workshop included some interactive activities during the presentation to stimulate discussion and creative thinking about the garden city ethos. The sessions ended with an assignment for students to explore their creativity based in the topic presented. They were asked to create a physical or audio advertisement for today’s population marketing for a new garden city. Below are some examples of these advertisements.