On the 19th of May I spent an enjoyable and creative day with year 7 students Natasha, Jodie, Jessica and Connie. Our theme for the day was the Tudor Explorer Sir Francis Drake. Having discovered Drake’s route around the world, we spent the morning making Tudor style maps to show his journey. We thought about how Tudor maps look different from contemporary maps, and the girls included some lovely details. Notice how the maps have compasses, and look at Jodie’s ships and Jessica’s llama!
In the afternoon we made a device for measuring the speed of a ship in knots, something that Drake might have used on board his ship, the Golden Hinde. In order to work out how fast something is moving you have to divide the distance travelled by the time it takes to cover that distance (remember the equation, speed= distance/time). It is very important to know how fast you are travelling when at sea to stop you from getting lost. The Tudor’s had an ingenious method for working out the speed of a ship using a log line, and we made one! First we attached a piece of rope around a spool, tying knots in the rope at measured intervals. At the end of the rope we attached a weight. Tudor sailors would throw the end of the rope into the water, and count how many knots passed through their fingers within a given time, measured by the sailor reciting a minute long poem. The sailor would then know how far the ship had travelled and how long it took, providing all the information needed to calculate the speed. The girls wrote their own poem, but be warned it’s a little bit crazy. We decided to play the game consequences as a way of writing it!
Tick tack toe, the mouse ran up the clock
The ship in the sea, the ship in the sea
St Francis Drake crossed the sea, to steal things for his Lady Queen
What should we do with the drunken sailor?
Sir Francis Drake ate a lot of cake
The things he stole were priceless and cruel
I love the taste and smell of the salty sea
Poem, poem this is the poem you drive me round the bend!
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