History for 5th Class

The people, customs and events of the place and the county, each read for whose view it keeps. The class finds whose names its streets remember, sets Halloween in 1783 beside Halloween now, works its county's own important event from the county's record and two tellings of it, walks the parish as it was described in 1837, and closes by placing the oldest things near the school on the long line of Ireland's ages.

The eras outcome at the start of the story: the first people, the first farmers, the builders of Newgrange, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, met through what they left in the ground, and then the first words written about Ireland and in it. Perspective is sharpest here, because these people left no words of their own: everything said about them was said by somebody else, a monk a thousand years ago, a Roman who never came, or an archaeologist reading a bog.

The eras outcome from the coming of Christianity to the Battle of Clontarf in 1014: Patrick, Brigid, the monasteries and their scholars, and the Vikings as raiders and as townspeople. Almost every written source of these centuries was made by churchmen, so each lesson sets that view beside another: a saint's own words beside a later Life, an annal beside a dig, a short entry beside a long story written for a king's family.

The political system outcome, from the Constitution's own words and real records rather than from a description of them: who makes the law and who must agree, how a bill becomes an Act, what TDs spend their time on, how a single transferable vote is counted, how Presidents have been chosen, and who gets a vote at all. No party, politician or position is praised or blamed, and the one arguable question, the voting age, gives every view a fair hearing.

The wider-world scale. Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, the first cities, in depth: they reach back to the first writing anywhere, they flourished while Ireland's first farmers built Newgrange, and they put the year's question at its sharpest, because the Mesopotamians wrote, so we read their own accounts, laws and school work, while nobody can yet read the Indus writing, so we know those people only from what they left and from what their neighbours wrote about them. The module closes on traditions people carried with them: the Huguenot families who came to Ireland from France, and the holy books different faith communities have written by hand, kept and used.