TEACHERS CONTENT GUIDE
CENSUS RECORDS

Using The Census

Objectives

To carry out a more focused enquiry using a census

Key Question

What is this document?

Why was it written?

What does it tell us about a) our locality b) the period of time it was written?

What does it tell us about some of the people in our locality?

How has this changed today?

Are there any surnames you recognise there?

What are the similarities and differences between families now and then.

National Curriculum Ref

4a 4b Historical enquiry
Unit 7 Local Study

Resources

Staffordshire Past Track Census return or hard copies from Stafford, Stoke, and Lichfield archive offices

Activity 1

Allow the children time to look at the original document, and attempt to transcribe it themselves.

Use the above questions to introduce this in depth enquiry study. Give children time to write down ideas and additional questions they might like to ask.

Ask the children to think about the information and select one aspect that could be displayed in graph form.

Age of people e.g. 0-10 11-12 13-21 etc

Where people were born, Staffordshire, Worcester etc

Number of people in family

Children display their information on bar charts or pictograms. Excel may also be used.

Activity 2

After studying the document, children choose to become one of the people from the census.

Begin by "hotseating" the children, asking them questions about their family, home and life.

Children plan and write a monologue as their character. When the written work has been edited and finalised, children could be invited to dress up as that character and share their work with the class or even school.

Cross curricular

Numeracy Using graphs to illustrate historical evidence

Literacy Creative writing, speaking,

Drama

Opportunities for Extension and Support

Extension

Children could generate their own detective style questions about the census, and give them to peers to answer. Between 5-10 questions would be fine. Encourage the use of mathematical as well as historical language.

i.e. most, least, more than, less than, estimate, sum of, total of.

Support

Children may wish to record their monologues into a recording facility.

Opportunities for ICT

Using Staffordshire Places online.

Using Excel to represent historical information.