Part 1: When my grandparents were young
This part has two missions; Mission 7 (Match it!) invites the pupils to match the old with the modern equivalent ege.g.: cooking over an open fire matches with a modern oven, milking a cow matches with a carton of milk, a pump with an indoor tap.
Mission 8 (Be an investigator: Find out more) asks the pupils to talk to an older person about their childhood (great tact required but over 50 years would be better for purposes of comparison) The pupils will be asked to find out and record
1. What the older person usually had for breakfast
2. How their homes were heated
3. How their homes were lit
4. How their clothes were washed and dried
5. Where they got their drinking water
6. Their favourite food as a child
7. How often they ate out
8. How many people were living with them
Then they could be encouraged to compare that with their own experience of childhood. This might be recorded in a table under the following headings:
Older person / Me
Breakfast
Heating
Lighting
Washing and drying clothes
Drinking water
Favourite food
Eating out
People in the house.
Certain observations may become obvious to the pupils after this research.
Part 2: The Family
Getting the facts right:
is a study of a simplified Census return for the Tucker family living in Raheny, Dublin, in 1901.
The children must answer true or false type questions about the family with reference to the census returns.
Family photo: The pupils view a photograph of a family who would have lived about the same time as the Tucker family. They should note the clothes, hair styles etc and then attempt to draw the family in their SESE copybooks.