Dissolution of the Monasteries: Haughmond Abbey

The history topic for the summer term was the Tudors, and together with this we aimed to develop a Local History Study, based on the effect of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries on Haughmond Abbey in Shropshire.

History was to have extended teaching time through using the literacy hour to focus on reading and then to apply this to an historical context - a bit of an experiment to provide a possible model for this to happen across the rest of the school. I had drawn up an initial planning framework and would teach the first eight lessons, then a colleague would take over and follow the unit through. At the end of the term we would assess the strengths of the scheme before presenting it to the rest of the staff.

The children had been introduced to the topic through using a writing frame for a Fact Box (SATs model from Reading Test 2000). A commission from English Heritage had provided the spur to research and generate an historical index to help discover what had happened to the canons of Haughmond before and after the dissolution.

Literacy context
I felt able to apply lessons I had learned from the video clips of John Fines' teaching and the use of Reading documents strategies to enable children to access difficult and demanding texts. I had been exploring the idea of offering 'real' situations within the literacy hour to raise both verbal and written skills. Work on identifying types of questions to interrogate a text and raise understanding beyond the literal had also been a focus of reading strategy teaching.

I set out to create a series of teaching and learning experiences that would offer me an opportunity to explore the possibilities for developing the local history unit scheme of work and to make this particular area of historical research a meaningful and stimulating experience for both myself and the children.

by Elaine Almond