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?

A classroom teacher talks about how the process of digital storytelling helped immerse her students in the past as they learnt about colonial times.

This site is a good example of how to use a digital story telling tool in your history classroom.  

What was school like in the 1950s? I love these visual images that seem vaguely familiar!

What did Sydney look like in the 1800s? Use this short clip of paintings by Conrad Martens to show significant buildings and land forms of the early colony. Teaching notes accompany the clip.

Use primary sources, such as paintings that were done at the time, to show what places were like in the past. In this 2 minute clip, the paintings by the artist Conrad Martens, provide a historical record of the early Sydney colony from 1835-1870.

 Paintings are a valuable source of information about a place in the past and can be used to develop historical understanding of concepts such as change and continuity or significance. Use this short clip of Conrad Martens' paintings to show what Sydney was like in the 1830s-1870s.