History for 3rd Class

The story of this particular place: why it is called what it is called, who lived here, what happened here, and what has changed across three generations. The module runs on the placename itself and on living people, and every lesson works for any locality in Ireland because the class supplies the place.

Compare and contrast house styles, examine domestic artefacts, and date real buildings the class can walk to. The street walk is the centre of the most tactile module in the course.

Investigate lifestyles in Ireland around 1926 through the printed census report the class can actually read: homes and rooms, work, language and birthplace for the class's own county, set beside photographs, ordinary household labour, and one local building that was already standing.

Folklore, games, sport, music and the traditions a community keeps, collected from the children's own families and from the class's own yard. Pupils are the primary source. Beliefs and traditions are described and never ranked.

The wider-world scale. Ancient Egypt in depth from abundant visual evidence, set beside ancient Greece so 'ancient' is a range of peoples, then stories and children's lives from other countries today, met in their own terms with the limits of evidence named to the last lesson.