Learning about the 1850’s!

In this unit I learnt what life was like in the 1850’s. There were lots of important events that I didn’t know happened such as the eureka stockade and when gold was discovered in 1851. A whole lot of people came to the goldfields to dig for gold. It was also really rough on the goldfields. Lots of punching and violence. At first, I didn’t know what the eureka stockade was or what life was like in the 1850’s. We went to sovereign hill for camp so we could experience what life was like on the goldfields for a child. We dressed up and we went to school. We did sewing, drawing, learnt how to write with an ink pen, read poems and learnt times tables. We always had to remember our manners, We had to call our teacher ma’am and always had to stand up when talking to an adult. Back then children were seen but not heard so we always had to wait for an adult to say we could speak before we could say anything. It was really fascinating because we could have just being told or researched about the gold rush but we were actually put in the picture at sovereign hill. I loved finding out a lot of information about the gold rush. I really liked walking around the streets in costume with my friends because I felt like I was actually living in the 1850’s. When we got back from sovereign hill we made a replica of sovereign hill. We were in partners and we were allocated a building and we had to make a model of that building. My partner and I were given two buildings so we had two dioramas. When everyone was finished making there dioramas we put then together on a piece of wood and we had made a model of sovereign hill. It looked really realistic!

Some of the skills I developed in this unit was compare and contrasting in reading rotations and mapping and location in maths. Comparing means what features are similar between certain things and contrasting means what features are different between certain things. We were presented with two texts about the gold rush, we then had to create a venn diagram finding the similarities and differences of both texts. In maths, I also learnt mapping and location, we had to draw our whole diorama from a birds eye view point and turn it into a map. We had to add coordinates, a scale and a compass. 

In writing I have also developed some writing skills. We had to write a newspaper article about our chosen building (which was the Smelting works where they melted the gold). I wrote my newspaper article about the welcome nugget which was the biggest and first nugget ever found. It was discovered by 22 miners from deep underground in the mine on the 9th of June 1854. There was a huge celebrations involving beer and champagne. 

Some PLA’s (positive learner attributes) I used when building my diorama were imagination because we had to imagine what the building looked like, communication and collaboration because we had to work as a team in order to get our diorama done and knowledge because during our time at sovereign hill we had to research our building so we would have some facts and information to refer to while making our diorama.

I really liked this unit because I learnt lots of new facts and important events of Australian History.

I really liked making our dioramas because we could be creative and the finishing product was a huge success.