Year 2 Spotlight 

Our Excursion to Rippon Lea Estate

This week, our Year 2 students visited Rippon Lea Estate for the Then and Now: Upstairs Downstairs excursion, an immersive history program designed to explore how life has changed over time. The students participated in a range of engaging, hands-on activities that brought the late 1800s to life.

They explored the mansion during a guided house tour and were fascinated by the rich decorations, the differences in the ways children were raised, and the grandeur of the dining room. In the kitchen, they compared old-fashioned cooking tools to those we use today, gaining a real sense of how technology has changed daily life. In particular, the children were amazed by the cool room, hidden in a shaded corner of the basement and furnished with slabs of stone, which acted like a fridge and kept food fresh for longer.

The children definitely enjoyed trying out ‘Servants’ Work’, where they got a taste of the hard work required to run a household in the past. They learned how to wash clothes by hand using a washboard, a rinsing paddle and then wringing the clothes out by hand. This deepened their understanding of the impact of technological advancements on household work. Other highlights included playing traditional games on the estate grounds and solving clues to find animal images on the Creature Catcher trail.

This excursion beautifully supported our learning in our current unit of inquiry, helping students make meaningful connections between past and present. It was a memorable and enriching experience that sparked curiosity and thoughtful discussion well beyond the visit.