Class 5-6W visit Buckingham Palace

On Thursday 11th September Class 5-6W spent a day in London.  They went to visit the Royal Mews before spending the afternoon at Buckingham Palace.

As part of our units of work in History and Literacy, we were lucky enough to visit London for the day.  We arrived in London at 10 O’clock and the first activity was a trip to the Royal Mews.  The Royal Mews is next to Buckingham Palace and it is where the Queen’s horses and coaches are kept.  We were met by our tour guide Shelia who whisked us through the security checks and straight to the learning centre – where we were able to drop off our school bags.

The first stop on our tour was to visit the horses.  Here we learnt that if horses need to travel they too need a passport.  Instead of a photo in their passport they have a diagram which shows their height and breed.  Did you know that horses are measured in hands? If a horse wants to work for the Queen it has to be 16 hands high.  The Queen likes to name all her horses and she normally names them after her favourite places that she has visited.

We then moved on to look at the Queen’s coaches.  Each coach was in immaculate condition and had been decorated in so much detail.  We had two coaches that we liked the best – the Diamond Jubilee Coach and the Golden Coach.  The Diamond Jubilee Coach was built in Australia and was meant to be given to the Queen for her 80th birthday.  It took them a little longer to build than they first thought as it was used for the very first time during the celebrations for her Diamond Jubilee.  The coach was very pretty and it had gold leaf and diamonds to decorate.  The other coach we liked was the Golden Coach.  This coach is so big that to remove it from its location they need to take a wall/door out.  This coach is over 200 years old but the Royal family find it the worst to travel in because it can get very cold and they get very travel sick in it!!

In the afternoon we moved on to Buckingham Palace where we were met by Will.  Will took us through security once more and walked us through the Palace to the room where we had our writing workshop.  The Palace was very busy and we were allowed to go through some short cuts to avoid the crowds.  Buckingham Palace was amazing!  The rooms were spectacular and the decorations in the rooms were beautiful.  We saw paintings, chandeliers – like you have never seen before- and the all-important thrones.

The class was split in two and we were given our own private tour of the Palace.  We were allowed to sit on the steps that James Bond walked up when he entered Buckingham Palace to collect the Queen for the Olympic Games in 2012.  (This area was roped off to the general public!)  We also looked at some of the paintings and rooms and we tried to think what it would be like if we lived in Buckingham Palace as a child.  As part of our tour we also looked at a toy exhibition which displayed some of the toys the children of the Royal family got to play with.  Our favourite were Prince Andrew’s replica of James Bond’s Aston Martin and Prince Charles’ wooden rollercoaster.

After visiting many more of the rooms we then returned to the learning room where we started to think about what we saw and how we could use it in our writing.  Now we are back at school we are going to use what we experienced and learnt at Buckingham Palace and use this in our Big Write next week.

 Class 5-6W

 

There are some photos to show the adventures that we had throughout the trip although we were not allowed to take photos inside Buckingham Palace.  We hope to add some of Big Write work from Buckingham Palace on to the website soon.