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Activities for Key Stage 2
In the past pilgrims often returned from their pilgrimage with a badge to show where they had been.
Pilgrims to the shrine of St James at Compostella wore a shell badge. Find out about saints celebrated in churches in your area and design a badge that pilgrims to your local church could wear.
Read about some of the adventures of St Brendan on his voyage.
Some of the stories just seem fantastical! Can pupils write some further adventures of the saint – weird and wonderful, no doubt, but also, perhaps, involving incidents which teach the wandering saint something about God or a lesson about being a better person.
Introduce pupils to Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress
Particularly the idea of life as a journey towards – hopefully - Heaven! What sort of problems and situations draw people off the road? Create a collage using newspaper pictures, adverts and so on to show this journey. Older children could create a map to illustrate the landscape of the ‘Journey of Life’ – with symbols to represent the various dangers and places of sanctuary.
Read the story of Rip van Winkle.
What is it like to return home after a long journey? How do the people who have stayed at home view the person who returns. Write a story about a pilgrim who returns to his half-remembered/half-forgotten home – write the story in two parts, firstly from the point of view of the person who returns, secondly from the perspective of the people who stayed behind and who now greet the returning pilgrim.