Crew Hamill have delved deeper into the mining industry and had a look at some of the main changes that have occurred since mining began. We worked in pairs to match the important events to a picture that illustrated them. Once we’d done this, we worked together to order them in chronological order. We discussed whether these changes were social, technological or political and discussed why these events were so important. For example, in the 1980s, lots of miners went on strike to fight for better pay.

As part of their expedition, Crew Hamill will be interviewing an ex miner in order to find out a little bit more about the experiences they had when working in the mines. In preparation for this, we worked in mini crews to chot some ideas for the questions we’d like to ask. We then worked as a crew to put our ideas together and generate a final list of questions which we will be asking on Friday.

To end Case Study 1, Crew Hamill worked together to consolidate all of our learning from the last 5 weeks. We worked together to create a mind map of all of the key elements of our expedition and how they helped us to answer the guiding question.

Today, Crew Hamill continued their history case study by exploring how life has changed since the early 20th Century. We used various sources of evidence to answer a number of questions in mini crews, focusing on how schools, housing and women’s rights have changed over the last century. We were shocked to see how different things were for the wealthy compared to the poor!

Crew Hamill already had some knowledge of Rosa Parks prior to this lesson as we had looked at her briefly during hook week and also came across her name during our lessons on Martin Luther King Jr. We knew already that he had helped her when she had been arrested but this lesson allowed us to find out in more detail exactly why she had been arrested and why this was so important. We worked together to become experts on Rosa Parks, looking at four different sources of evidence: a newspaper article, a story, some direct quotes and the police report from her arrest. We worked in pairs to analyse these sources of evidence and pull out as much information as we could, adding it to our BBK. We then came together as a full crew and shared this information to create chotting sheets for our class display.

We began this lesson by watching a video of Martin Luther King Jr’s speech, “I Have a Dream”, discussing how it made us feel and any notices we made about it. We then spent some time looking at some of the key vocabulary from the speech that we might have needed some support understanding: manacle, stripped, selfhood, quicksand, injustice, sweltering, oppression. Once we had more of an understanding of these words, we looked at a selection of quotes from MLK’s speech that included this vocabulary and we worked as a crew to pull them apart. This allowed us to really understand some of the key messages Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to get across in his speech.