Teaching Ideas

Making a study of food and farming in the past is intended to help children to develop an understanding of the everyday challenge which finding enough to eat presented to people throughout time. This should also be shown to be a constant struggle in many parts of the world even in modern times.

The unit links very closely to the primary history curriculum for third and fourth classes and particularly to strands such as Early peoples and ancient societies and Continuity and change over time. The skills and concepts set out in the history curriculum, such as time and chronology, cause and effect and using evidence should be developed through the content of the strands.

Through the study of Food and Farming children can begin to notice that the basic human need for food has always been present. They will also begin to see how peoples in different times contributed to many advances in technology and science, factors which often improved the quantity of food produced. Choosing a theme such as Food and Farming allows a chronological approach to be developed and the use of pictorial and other timelines can be built up to as children work through the unit.

The teacher could select one or two sections of the unit for particular lessons over a number of weeks and allow children to independently study other areas through working through the site. The teacher could assess learning of all areas at the end of a period of time through a quiz. Alternatively, a teacher might decide to teach lessons on each of the five sections allowing a study from The Stone Age to the present time through use of the site as well as some supplementary materials.

The study of Food and Farming should allow children opportunities to respond in different ways to the evidence and content that they are encountering on the Ask About Ireland site unit and within the history lessons based on the topic.

Some examples:

Linguistic intelligence - children should have opportunities to produce written work, to read about the topic and to discuss it. The purposes of children's writing and oral work in history should be to communicate information and what they are learning and to help children to remember, persuade and to explore what it might have felt to have lived at different time in the context of the evidence. Suitable activities should be arranged by teachers for discussion, reading and problem solving in pairs. Links should be made to geography, science and other aspects of the curriculum such as English.

Mathematical - children could graph some of the information which they collect from interviews.

Interpersonal - children should engage in drama activities and discussion tasks

Bodily kinaesthetic - where possible children might examine artefacts such as kitchen utensils used in the past to prepare food. The should have opportunities to make representations such as models of a ringfort farmstead, a drawing of a plough etc.

Visual/spatial intelligence - teaching history should be linked as much as possible to the visual arts. Opportunities are presented particularly to explore visual evidence such as paintings , drawing and photographs and to ask questions of this evidence. Children might be asked to draw, paint, copy , interpret what food and farming in the past was like.