This is an online version of this resource. When you buy the course it is provided in a printable PDF format with additional links to support further study.
Lesson 2: Diaries
Introducing the Lesson
Spend some time recalling your lesson from last week and how you read the book Watercress. Remind your child how foods can be a part of your family story and a part of history and also how objects tell a story too.
Please ask your child if they know what a diary is. Sometimes called a journal, you are looking into a personal notebook rather than a diary used more for a calendar, so you may like to make that clear. You can explain that such notebooks are used to record events, insights, thoughts and happenings and so are an intriguing object to examine history through.
Reading a Living Book
In the book Sophie Scott Goes South author Alison Lester shares her travels to Antarctica, writing this book based on the travel diary she kept while undertaking the journey. If you have already have a copy of this book from
Kindergarten please take the time this lesson to look through it again, focusing on how this is a book made up of diary entries. If you do not have a copy of the book you can watch it as a read-aloud in the Year One Picture Book Links.
Following your reading, simply ask your child to re-tell you what you read, writing down their oral narration in their Humanities Notebook. After this you may like to go through and look at how the diary entries are represented, looking for the titles like “Day 15” and so on. Your child may observe that there isn’t a diary entry for each day.
Please use this book to show your child that this is one person’s diary based on one trip they made. This is a part of their own personal history and it is intriguing for us to read. By reading this book of diary entries we learn the sequence of (chronological) events in Sophie’s trip: it starts when the trip started and the diary ends with her and Captain Scott returning home to Mum and Alfie. We also learn lots of amazing facts about Antarctica and get a glimpse into what it is like to visit this frozen continent. You may like to explain that by reading diary entries about times past historians can learn a lot about the past.
You may like to talk about how many people choose to keep a diary or a journal just like Alison Lester did. While this one was based on a travel journal, the regular observations and notes from many people in years past have helped us to develop a picture of what life was like in places and many years ago. In this way, diaries are an important historical tool and one way we can learn about people, events and incidents long ago.
Optional Lesson Activities
You may also like to share with your child the various notebooks and diaries that are included in the Complementary Links for this lesson. The emphasis is that looking at such objects helps us to better understand moments and changes in history because we can look at a first-hand account from someone who was living in that age.
You may like to encourage your child to try to keep a diary just for one week so they appreciate what is involved in remembering to write something each day and making time to do it. Allocate some time each day to write out the simple narration they give you telling you about their day to form their diary entries. You can include this in your Humanities Notebook if you wish.
Creating a Notebook Entry
Your child’s oral narration of Sophie Scott Goes South will form the Notebook entry for this lesson. However, if you wish, you may also like to ask them why diaries are important for historians to know more and record their answer in their Notebook.
Picture Book Link
Please enjoy the book Watercress by Andrea Wang as a part of this lesson. You can watch it as a read-aloud here (5 mins):
Information about the watercress plant will help you to better understand this plant that is the focus of the book for this lesson. Further information can be found here, along with a map that shows the distribution of the plant within the USA.