Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole on International Nurses Day: May 12th

International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on May 12^th, Florence Nightingale’s birthday. It’s a great opportunity to tell the children in your class about both Florence Nightingale, Mary Seacole and the important role nurses play in our world today.

How KnowledgeBox can help:

Type Florence Question path into Quick Find

Use this animation to tell Florence’s life story and to explain her important role in the development of modern nursing. The animation is part of a KnowledgeBox Question path. It contains lots of  other useful resources including photos and pictures you can  use in your whiteboard presentations, as well as print activities for the children to use away from the computer.

Follow this up with work on Mary Seacole and you could have a very interesting unit of study.

Type Mary Question path into Quick find

Use the KnowledgeBox Mary Seacole animation to find out about Mary Seacole’s life and the resources in the Question path for follow up activities. 

BBC Active’s new ‘Find Out About Famous Men, Women and Children‘ has a whole unit of resources about Mary Seacole. Here you’ll find dramatised video clips about her life plus drag and drop sequencing and labelling activities  – all ideal for your whiteboard.

BBC Active's Famous Men Women and Children

 

If you don’t have BBC Active Find Out About Famous Men Women and Children on your KnowledgeBox and would like to find out more about this module, please call 0800 567 8032 or email enquiries@uk.knowledgebox.com.

Similarities and differences

Once they’ve found out about Florence and Mary, ask the children to identify the similarities  between the two life stories:

• How were the women treated when they wanted to help soldiers fighting in the Crimea?
• Why were they treated this way?
• Why were they treated so differently?
•  Do they think this would happen today?
• Why is Florence more famous than Mary?

Nursing today

You could then move on to looking at nursing today. How is nursing today similar and different to how it was two hundred years ago? Ask the children to think about the uniform, hospital conditions, treatment and care. Arrange for a nurse to visit your classroom and to sit in the ‘hot seat’ to answer questions from the children.

Out on the web

For Florence Nightingale:

• This onscreen book from the BBC retells Florence’s life story. A short Quiz is also available.
• Interesting pictures and original source documents are used to answer the question’ Why do we remember her?’ on this Florence Nightingale website from the Learning Curve.
• Photos of Florence’s stuffed pet owl, her nursing apron and many more fascinating objects on this Florence Nightingale Museum site.

For Mary Seacole:

• This onscreen book from the BBC retells Mary’s life story of. A short Quiz is also available.
• Detailed information, about Mary Seacole’s life plus the only known photographic portrait of Mary can be found on this site.
• You can play interactive games about herbal medicine and  listen to Mary retelling her life story on this site from the Yorkshire Museums and Libraries service.

And finally…

For those of you keen on trivia:

• Florence was born in Florence, Italy while her well off mother and father took a two year honeymoon travelling around Europe.
• A portrait of Mary Seacole was found at a car boot sale and is now housed in the National Portrait Gallery

Do you know of other useful resources for teaching about Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole? We’d love to hear from you.

Catharine
Producer