Human Interest

Planning historical inquiry in the primary classroom

To help young children develop an understanding of the past, teachers can design a historical inquiry around topics that are relevant to their students (e.g. school, family, toys)

Teaching ideas:

• Use an inquiry approach and pose questions to stimulate prior knowledge and ideas e.g. What was school like in the olden days?
• Use primary sources e.g. Watch original film footage or observe historical images or documents
• Decode visual sources- e.g. children can take turns to describe what they can see in a picture. Ask students to identify particular aspects, label different features, write a caption
• Ask questions to give an overview of the image- what people can you see? where are they? what are they doing? who do you think they are? why? Are there any letters, words, numbers?
• Ask questions to elicit details about the visual source such as- what are they wearing? what are they holding? what sorts of clothes are they wearing? what sorts of hairstyles? what sorts of foods/games/classrooms? What are they doing in the picture? What does the picture tell us about women, race, children, age etc;
• Analyse primary sources- e.g. compare similarities and differences with school today. Imagine what school will be like in the future.
• Provide graphic organisers which allow students to organise their knowledge and ideas. E.g. 'T Chart" (before and now), Venn Diagram (similarities and differences).
• Address historical concepts e.g. change and continuity, cause and effect, chronology.
• Teach and use different types of historical language (e.g. language of historical time- 1940s, decade, long ago, in the olden days OR the language of historical processes such as similarity, difference).
• Talk about historians use primary sources to find out about the past
• Construct an historical narrative about what school was like in the past
• Think about what school will be like in the future

For further reading:

Cooper, H.(2002). History in the early years.

Husbands, C. (1996). What is history teaching?

This resource is part of an initiative by the Australian Government to capture stories and aspects of what makes up the Australian Community Heritage. The website is directed by four key aspects- People, places, events and groups. Within each of these headings teachers (or students) have the opportunity to search use an interactive map to find their local community and discover the different aspects that is seen as heritage. This resource also provides users with the opportunity of contributing their own family or community stories.

Teaching Idea:

This website is a perfect opportunity for students to explore online, gather information and contribute to an online resource which is a key content area within stage 2 (Board of Studies, 2006). While it is assumed that students have already developed key skills in relation to the use of websites it is important that tasks being used with this resource have been scaffolded in a way that student learning is optimized (Dufficy, 2005).

An engaging activity that could be used with this resource is for students to create their own admission to the community website. As Gilbert and Hoepper (2011) contend the use of ICT within the classroom provides a significant opportunity to engage students learning. Further more, they contend that an effective investigation involves students having a goal at the end of their unit that they work towards (Gilbert & Hoepper, 2011). By using the goal of a submission the teacher has the opportunity to engage students in a process of exploring, gathering, creating, editing and producing their own individual text about their heritage. Processes that the NSW Quality Teaching framework outlines as an important technique in assisting students gain a greater significance from the task.

Resources:

Board of Studies, (2006). Human Society and It’s Environment K-6 Syllabus Board of Studies. 

Dufficy, P. (2005). Designing Learning for Diverse Classrooms. Sydney: Primary English Teaching Association Australia.

Gilbert, R. & Hoepper, B. (2011). Teaching Society and Environment. 4th Edition. South Melbourne: Cengage Learning Australia

NSW Department of Education and Training. (2006a). Quality teaching in NSW public schools: A classroom practice guide. Sydney: Author. Retrieved 5 May, 2012 from https://www.det.nsw.edu.au/media/downloads/proflearn/secure/clasprag.pdf