Investigating Victorian mining disasters

Mining Disasters teachers notes (197 KB)
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In this series of lessons about two mining disasters, I integrated learning in history, literacy and ICT. As the children are an able group, I intended to challenge them to explore primary written sources, to identify differences between them, to reconstruct family groupings affected by the second disaster, to give dramatic interpretations of the historical event described, and finally to write with both feeling and accuracy about it.

My class of Year 6 children had already studied aspects of Victorian Britain, including Child labour in the cotton industry. In September, as an introduction to the period, we visited the Black Country Museum in Dudley, which included a trip down a Victorian coal mine. http://www.bclm.co.uk/

To teach these lessons using ICT you need to construct a database from information given on the Durham Mining Museum website

by Paul Sutton

The photo above right shows the winding gear at Blaenavon National Coal Museum, South Wales, rather than a site of the mining disasters described here.