Activity: Design a Hillfort

Ask your learners to design a hillfort. They will need to include a few basic elements such as ramparts and roundhouses. They should also consider the surrounding landscape to ensure it provides necessary resources like building materials (stone, wood), fresh water and land suitable for farming. However, the end result can be dictated by their imagination.

Your learners could depict their hillforts in drawings, paintings, mixed media or collages. Can they gather leaves, pebbles and twigs to add texture? Perhaps they could use leaves to represent trees, depict fluffy sheep or wispy smoke with cotton wool, or add some crinkly aluminium foil to represent water. Cut out pictures from magazines and newspapers - trees, foliage, crops, blue skies - to add interest.

The worksheet provided gives prompts for your learners to plan out their creation.

Duration

1.5 hours

Materials

• Printed worksheets (link above)

• Pens, pencils, crayons, paint, paintbrushes, glue

• Old newspapers and magazines

• Tin foil, cotton wool, lollipop sticks, wool/yarn

• Twigs, leaves, small pebbles