Now and Then, Quakers Past and Present

As you all know, in Junior and Senior Infants we have been learning all about the past.  We started by looking at lots of photographs of a little boy named Hugh.  Then, we sorted the photos and created a timeline so that the photos told the story of Hugh's life from the day he was born until the present day.  

Then, we learned about some famous Quakers from the past.  We learned about the Cadbury family who make chocolate.  We discovered that Cadburys sold drinking chocolate first and then they discovered how to make eating chocolate.  We looked at Dairy Milk wrappers and decided which were from the past and which were from recent times.

We learned about Elizabeth Fry, especially the way in which she helped to improve conditions in prisons.  We found out that she taught people to sew so that they could make clothes to keep them warm in prison.  We decided to try some needlework ourselves!

We discovered that, in the past, boys and girls did lots of chores at home.  We also found out that Mums did lots of baking as it was often very expensive to buy food in the shops.  We decided to master some of these old skills ourselves so we baked bread and made butter and jam.  After all our hard work we had a lovely tea party!

We had a visit from Finley's Grandad, Robert, who told us all about life in the past.  He described all the chores he had, the toys he played with, games he played and the clothes he wore.  He also spoke about NJS as he came to this school when he was little.  We were delighted to have him and everyone really enjoyed his visit. 

Everyone also created their own timelines and brought them to school and we had great fun listening to everyone telling us about their lives and showing us all their lovely photographs.  The timelines are on display outside the office and everyone is welcome to come and look at them. 


At the end of the fortnight, we recreated a school room from the Olden Days.  Everyone made a super effort to dress like boys and girls from the past.  This is just a very small selection of the photographs we have.  The rest of the photographs will form part of our presentation for our School of Excellence Award.

Thank you to all the parents for your help and support in dressing up and in creating the lovely timelines.   We hope that you enjoyed putting together the timelines as much as we enjoyed looking at them.  We really enjoyed this unit of work and we all discovered lots about the past