DETECTIVE'S FUN DAYS

Whether you are thinking of running your own fun day for heritage detectives, or wanting to help your children enjoy being a heritage  detective,  we hope these notes and ideas will help you.  

When heritage detectives go questing, they try to discover stories in the stones and your task is to help them by offering short introductory quests which introduce the tools that are available to help in the detective work and offering opportunities for them to be used in a realisitc environment.

Heritage detectives need to look, to wonder, to imagine and think about what they discover. For some years now the Heritage Knights have been developing and honing tools to help develop detective skills that will assist young heritage detectives learn from things they see around them and build up a picture of times gone by. Your task as workshop leaders is to create opportunities for heritage detectives to learn to use these tools, develop their wondering skills and start to hear the stories in the stones. If you do your job well you will have started something that will last a life time!

In these 'Workshop' pages you will see some of the ways that the Heritage Knights have used the tools in the past. You are welcome to follow their examples or to develop your own ideas. If you do decide to develop your own examples please share your experiences so that we can all learn from them. But first familiarise yourself with our tools, think of them in relation to your own particular interests and begin to build a learning package.

Remember…. all Heritage Knights 'wonder as they wanderʼ Some wander through space and time - yes an experienced and committed knights can travel through time! Their skill is in the strength of their imagination. Others can make the past come alive through their storytelling skills. Others enjoy researching through books and documents and present information in ways that feed the stories.....and so on.

Detective's Fun Days take place in historic churches because these building have so many stories to discover within their walls. They include up to four 50 minute workshops, and plenty of music and fun.

BRINGING THE PAST TO LIFE

Lets take a closer look at what it means to ʻwonder as you wanderʼ and to discover stories in the stones.

Wherever we go we walk in the footsteps of those who have gone before us, from them we have inherited buildings, tools and equipment etc. etc. … even whole landscapes. But, it is not easy to bring the past to life or to people the past, even in our imaginations, and that was what Go West was aiming to do in its Stories from the Stones pilot funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and then we had a stroke of really good fortune……