Background to Homes Unit
The Looking at Homes History unit for 1st and 2nd classes will enable pupils to work as historians in order to:
- begin to distinguish between past and present and begin to develop an understanding of chronology
- become aware of change and continuity in personal lives, in their families and their immediate local environments
- extract information about the past from a variety of sources; photographs, objects, memories and buildings
- communicate an awareness of people, stories and events from the past in a variety of ways
- imagine what home life was like in the past.
Curriculum Integration
This unit suggests a cross-curricular approach, integrating the study of the strand units: Change and Continuity in the Local Environment and When my Grandparents were young from the history curriculum with the strand unit Living in the Local Community from the Geography curriculum. Other possibilities for integration might be: Gaeilge (Sa Bhaile), English (Story Telling as a pastime), Physical Education (Irish dancing), Maths (Bar chart of Age of pupil's homes), Art (Sketching the environment, painting family portraits), Music (Traditional Irish music and the instruments on which it is played).
Overview of Unit
The unit is divided into two sections and each section could take two classes to complete.
The First Section (The City Then and Now, The Country Then and Now) explores how both the built environment and the rural environment have changed in the last 100 years. This section has two parts and each part has three 'missions' (activities) for the pupils.
The Second Section (When my Grandparents were Young and The Family) looks at the interior of houses in the first half of the last century. The pupils will be given an opportunity to discover what childhood was like for an older person that they know and to look in detail at the structure of a particular family in Co. Clare from an examination of the 1911 Census return. Again this section has two parts and each part this time has two missions.
The entire unit, Looking at Homes, could take four classes to complete.