It's that time of the year where I am finding myself teaching the Stone Age and the Bronze Age at school again. Still teaching the same year group, the topics and curriculum repeat.
Students find these topics really interesting, but their image of cavemen walking with dinosaurs and fighting off T-Rex is quickly corrected. Grasping a time frame of 10s of millions of years is difficult at first.
Once we move onto the bronze age, students are excited to learn how swords, spears and arrows are made. Already knowing how homo-erectus and homo sapiens made their tools, this was naturally the next step.
Casting was relatively easy to understand, after all its still a common process used today. Unable to visit a real facility to see first hand each step of casting, we decided to to take the DIY route and bring it to the classroom.
Swapping bronze, a mix of tin and copper for wax, we could liquefy our product at much lower and safer temperatures- all within the classroom.
Students were given clay to mold 2 identical spearhead shapes taken from a paper template. As these 2 halves were fitted together and all edges sealed, a void was left inside in the shape of their spearhead.
The hot wax was poured in to an opening at the top, filling their mold. As the wax cooled and solidified, it formed their spearhead.
The clay was pealed and picked off leaving the wax mold.
Once the spearheads had been dug out, the students shaped them with the edges of scissors and meta rulers. Any excess clay was washed off.
Luckily none of the casts broke when being opened. The students were able to shape their spearheads to the shape they wanted- we just didn't have any sticks for spears, so they were used as spear-daggers or dagger-spears!
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