Week One
During the half term the children have been sent a letter and postcard; the postcard dates back to the early 20thcentury. They have been told that they are the sender of the postcard and that they are embarking on a trip of a life-time. They are asked to bring along the postcard, along with an object that they have with them on their trip.
Arriving at school the children discuss the time period of the postcard and generate questions or observations that they have made about them. Next they are told that they are sailing to America (via France and Ireland) and are given a passenger list from which to choose their name as the sender of the card. They are asked to write their postcard as if being sent at the beginning of their trip and as a result begin to invent back stories for their chosen passengers. Who are they? Who are they travelling with? Why are they going to America? What class ticket do they hold? Etc.
At the end of the day, the children are told that the ship that they are sailing on is, in fact, the Titanic, and that many of them will not survive.
Next day the children are given access to a digital database of Titanic passengers. They use this to search for their chosen passenger, printing off information about them to read and, of course, discovering whether they survived or not. They also use books and ipads to find out about what life would have been like for their passenger on the ship, according to the class of ticket they held.
As an aside, we look at the measurements of the ship given in feet and convert this to metres, comparing the lengths to objects in today’s world.
We then watch a short film which gives an overview about the disaster. This prompts many questions and these are all then recorded for later discussion.
Returning to our objects, we begin to write Odes, using thesaurus’ to help us to develop our use of superlatives.
Week Two
Still unsure as to the actual organisation they will be running this term and desperate to know more we move to today and meet our current owner. As teacher in role, the children are introduced to Leslie Harrison and hear about why she came to be in charge of this Oceanography business – her great-great-grandfather died on the Titanic and his son set up the business in 1929.
We wonder what his motivation might have been to do this and used drama to explore this reasoning. We also use the digital database to find out a little more about her great-great-grandfather, William Henry Harrison.
Knowing that we are oceanographers and the motivation behind the formation of our company, we create the logo and decide on a name: Explorers of the Deep.
Realising that the objects carried by our passengers would have ended up at the bottom of the ocean for 60+ years, we wonder how different materials might change when left in sea-water, or even different solutions or mixtures. In order to find out we design and create different experiments to test these changes. Each group changes different variables: light and dark; solutions and mixtures; different materials submerged; temperature of water and amount of salt in the solution.
We read a text about the rusticles that have formed on the Titanic, despite there being very little oxygen that deep in the ocean, and discover that the ship is being slowly eaten by bacteria and that it may even collapse in on itself in the future.
Looking at how other objects have changed after being left in the sea for a long period of time, we make changes to our own using collected items from the seaside and art and craft materials.
Fortuitously, the Year 3 and 4 class teacher brings in real fish for her class to draw (in relation to their adventures in Narnia) – this seems like a perfect thing for us to do also, and being Year 5 and 6 we don’t stop there – we dissect the fish, exploring how their bodies are made and identifying their external and internal parts! Our drawings are beautiful. We also create our own (much smaller) version of the Titanic’s bow.
Week Three (only 2 days due to strike action)
On Monday morning the children walk into the classroom to discover netting hanging from the ceiling with their fish sketches and objects hanging from the ceiling. We find ourselves in an underwater world, with the Titanic’s bow protruding from the corner of the room.
We look at some data from the sinking in relation to different groups of passengers and the number of deaths. We investigate the information and make statements about what we’ve found. One of the children wonders if you were more likely to die if you were a third-class passenger. We spend all week investigating the percentages – first by rounding the numbers to make them more manageable, then estimating using bar modelling and then using our own strategies to get as close as we can to the percentage of deaths for each class of passenger.
A week on from first setting up our experiments we go to look at how they are doing and write up our observations. We write a report about what we have done so far; this is then edited and written up in neat.
Week Four
Having worked out our percentages we share our strategies and our results. Most of our results are similar, but as they are different we need to find the mean percentage of deaths for each class. We discover that Dora was right – 76% of third-class passengers died, compared to 37% of 1stclass and 61% of second.
We create digital bar charts to represent our findings pictorially, as well as draw our own estimations onto pie charts.
Later, we turn to a frame hanging on the wall which holds a question mark and then a plaque reading, ‘Father – In Loving Memory’. Having investigated Leslie’s family line we wonder which father this picture may be depicting. We decide that it would be her great-great-grandfather who died on the Titanic; before drawing our portrait of him we look at male clothing from that time (as well as work out who was on the throne). We all create our version of William Henry Thomas, but only one is chosen to hang in our company office.
Now that we have our founder (Thomas Harrison) and our inspiration (William Henry Harrison) we turn to the years that have passed since our company began. We create the headlines from our company history and begin to find out a little more about our organisation.