Stonehenge lesson for preschool and elementary

For our homeschool history lesson this week we read about how Stonehenge was made, and how we aren’t entirely sure how the ancient Britons moved these huge 26-ton boulders from place to place.  Of course, you can’t just read about Stonehenge without building your own Stonehenge.

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Stonehenge lesson resources

I was absolutely positive my library had books on Stonehenge, but I was mistaken. So the one, and only one book I’m recommending to you I haven’t read, but I’m familiar with the series it is a part of, and the series is a generally solid series.

• Where is Stonehenge

And these are the videos from when I taught this to my 8th graders (I’m sharing my entire Ancient and Middle Ages British history playlist).

Preschool Stonehenge lesson

Future Ticia here, we redid this lesson later as an elementary lesson, so I’ve added in the Stonehenge lesson for elementary kids under here, so if you’ve got multi-age groups you can now do this activity with more kids.
So, build we did.  I’d read suggestions of trying this with rocks.  But, our local rocks are all limestone and come out in very irregularly shaped blobs, not good for many craft projects.  Next, I thought of bricks, but I’m sure someone would drop it on their foot, and then off to the ER we’d go.

Finally, I remembered the Jenga blocks (I obsessively stalk Target, Michael’s, Wal Mart, and Hobby Lobby to find “tumbling blocks” on sale to add to our stockpile of blocks).

This picture (above) is mere seconds before Batman decided to cause an “act of God” and destroy our Stonehenge.  We had a lot of fun talking through how to make it and how to best balance the pieces.
Princess eventually joined in on the act and made her own mini-Stonehenge (yes I put the picture of her earlier, but we’ll call it artistic license).

And of course, it ended with the kids happily playing with the blocks, with a few extra guidelines added in.  I had to literally divide the blocks down the middle and give half to each boy, because that was starting to get ugly.

Stonehenge lesson for elementary (with suggestions for middle school)

Our second time around for the Stonehenge lesson we did get out the Jenga blocks again, but we built our Stonehenge(s) outside.  In the Mystery of History 1, one of the theories for why Stonehenge was built is to show the time of year.  Sort of a giant perpetual calendar.

We obviously weren’t going to devote our front yard to this for years, but we could use a day to show something different.  This is a variation on our sun lesson, where we measured shadows.  This time we were going to measure how the shadows moved and predict lessons learned from it.

We watched as the shadows moved for part of the day, and how they were almost gone by lunchtime, but we ran into the same snag as we had before.  The weather didn’t cooperate.  The clouds rolled in and we had no shadows to measure.

Wanting to extend this Stonehenge lesson to middle or high school students?  Middle school students can research star patterns and how they change depending on the time of year.  If Stonehenge was built to show the passage of time, they can learn about other ways to mark the passage of time.

Middle School Stonehenge lesson ideas

• research how the stars move to indicate the passage of time
• what other reasons was Stonehenge built?  look into some of those
• how did the builders move the stone blocks?  Research and come up with ideas (this can also be used for high schoolers)

High School Stonehenge lesson ideas

• compare Stonehenge to other possible timekeeping devices, look at the Aztecs and Mayans for some amazing time devices
• research Stonehenge in literature, Stonehenge frequently appears in fantasy novels because of its mystery.
• research druidic religious practices

More hands-on homeschool ideas

• Great Wall of China lesson
• Battle of Jericho lesson
• Ancient Olympics lesson
• Ancient Sumerian hands-on lessons
• How to mummify a chicken