Year 2 – People of the Past

[MaryRoseG Participant]

Good Morning

I am helping our Year 2 teachers with some resources for their history topic, and have been looking at the FOSIL framework for Year 1/2.  Many of the skills they need to know focus on books – knowing the difference between fiction and non fiction, using an index, etc – but all these Covid restrictions mean that they are jumping straight into using the iPads because they can’t share books.  We use Follett Destiny LMS, and so I am making Collections (similar to Wakelet) of a small number of sites for them to use to find information about inventors, etc. but I feel like I am skipping a crucial step of critical thinking; there is a general acceptance that everything they find on the internet must be right, so it seems to me to be important to at least start them thinking about the information and its reliability.  Had they had books, this process would have started with the exploration of the differences between fiction/non-fiction, but I feel like it might be just too complex?!

This is rather a stream of consciousness, and I think I just need to see how it goes and perhaps reflect afterwards how the framework points can be reshaped to focus on online resources rather than books, but if anyone has any age appropriate resources for website evaluation, I would love to see them.

[Elizabeth Hutchinson Participant]

Hello Mary-Rose, have you come across Swiggle? It is a child-friendly search engine…https://swiggle.org.uk/teachers/ and the other place I would look is SWGFL (South West Grid for Learning) They provide digital literacy lessons for younger students so worth checking out too https://digital-literacy.org.uk/

Let me know if these are any good.

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Thanks, Elizabeth.

This raises an important point, from two perspectives.

Firstly, the systematic and progressive development of inquiry skills, which, as Mary-Rose points out, includes dealing with different types of sources and the organization of information within those sources. If through design and/ or necessity children miss the opportunity to acquire specific developmentally-appropriate inquiry skills, their foundation becomes unstable and their progress is hampered. We either, then, need to compensate for this later, or differently (see below).

Secondly, facilitating access to the print collection. Although aimed at Upper School students, the following LibGuide is an example of how we have gone about facilitating access to our superb print collection for A-level Historians: Slavery (A-level History NEA).

We have used a similar approach, except with online PDF resource packs (see Resource pack in the Forum), with Years 6, 7, 8 and 9.

This can also serve a pedagogical purpose, in that we can teach about about different types of sources and the organization of information within those sources while also providing them with information from those sources. The following two Topics and associated LibGuides make this clearer:

• Year 12 Economics Inquiry – Income and Wealth |LibGuide for Income and Wealth (Economics A-Level)
• Pressure groups inquiry (A-Level Politics) |LibGuide for Pressure Groups (Politics A Level)

All of this should be possible, with or without LibGuides, in a primary setting.

Of course, this all takes time, but the re-use value is very high and you will see that much of what we are doing is the result of many years of work.

I am confident, though, that as our shared pool of knowledge and resources grows, so will our efficiencies.

[MaryRoseG Participant]

Thank you so much Elizabeth for the resources from SWGFL; I had seen them ages ago, but had completely forgotten about them.  They will be extremely useful.

Darryl – your example for the A Level History, and  is extremely useful and has made me realise that if I display the information correctly, and use a proper website (like LibGuides) to sort and collate it, it will be much easier to demonstrate and teach these skills.  Follett Collections doesn’t allow for any sort of criticality or specific organisation, so I know have another reason to invest in LibGuides!

Thank you so much.

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