This article was originally published online and in print by teachPrimary. You can find a copy of the print article and all of the resources mentioned in the article on the teachPrimary website.

The chug of steaming pistons and coal smut in the air – nothing is more evocative of the Victorian era than steam trains. From rattling coal wagons grew great behemoths that supercharged the Industrial Revolution and had a lasting impact on the lives, landscapes and economies of our local communities.

Use the six-week unit plan and accompanying teaching pack to help your pupils explore how the introduction of trains changed communities, their national impact, and the delicious changes that trains delivered to our diets. Pupils will practice using primary sources, integrating historical maps, ordering timelines and drawing conclusions from their research.

Week 1 - Mapping

Learning Objective: To use primary historical sources

Lesson Outline – In this first lesson, students are looking at the history of their own house. This allows them to rehearse skills for the next lesson. Start by discussing their houses. How old is your house? How can you tell when your house was built? Then discuss maps and revise those skills from Geography about maps symbols, scales and how to look at a map. Use an OS map (explore.osmaps.com) to explore a modern online map. This map might not be up to date if you have house building near you.

Now it is time to get online and interrogate historical maps. Using the Vision of Britain website, ask children to find their house (or the land their house is on) using the 1856 and 1916 maps. Children will need to type in the name of their town into the box on the home page and then click the links for maps and then the maps from 1856 and 1916. The website is easy to use, but it is worth modelling on the board first.  

Allow time for children to look at the maps and find their house – this can take longer than you expect as students will be excited to see all the changes over time. My school’s village was not much bigger than the street we are on in 1856. After time for exploring, children should answer these questions, referring to evidence from the maps. If their house was not built, they should describe what the land was at that time:  

• What was your house in: 1856, 1916 and 2021?

• How has land use around your house changed?

• What has noticeably changed about where you live from 1856 to now?

Assessment: Have children found their house on the maps? Are they able to interpret between modern maps and the historical maps?

Week 2 – Mapping trains

Learning Objective: To compare primary historical sources.

Lesson Outline: Start by recapping last lesson and sharing the land changes children found on the different maps. Then expand out to discuss the town/village/area your school is in. Has our town always looked at it does today? What was here at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837? What are the oldest parts of our town? How do you know?

As a class, study the 1856 map of your area (you can take a screen shot from Visions of Britain). Compare this with a map from 1904 or 1916 and spot the initial differences.

Focus in on an area where a train line was built between the two times. Many of the train lines in use today were built in the Victorian era, so focus on the line closest to your school. This may mean that your school is not on the maps used. Give children printouts of maps from 1856 and 1904/1916; colour prints in A3 are best for this.  Allow time for exploring and pair/table discussion. Students may find that place names have changes, roads rerouted, house demolished or lots of new buildings. Then pose questions for children to answer to help them explore the maps. You will need to write you own: below are examples I wrote for my class.

• How has the area of Middle Green changed? What lanes are now missing?

• What was removed to make way for the train line?

• What spellings have changed on the maps?

• Each black square is a building. What new buildings can be seen on the Main Road.

Assessment: Can all children describe changes over time? What buildings have changed? Can some children explain how the landscape changed?

Week 3 – History of trains

Learning Objective: To sequence historical events.

Lesson Outline: Start by imagining a world without powered transport. What would our world be like if our fastest mode of transport was a horse? What would the world be like if we moved slower than 30mph?

The first half of this lesson is exploring and discussing the history of steam trains as a class. Start with a short video and then work through the history of trains slides (see the downloads for his article). You may wish to add to this if your local area has strong historical links to trains (Crewe, Derby, Middlesborough, Swindon…) to include further weight to the local study aspect of this unit.

In the second half of the lesson, children create a timeline of events from the age of steam. The list of events is far longer than is possible to fit on the timeline. Therefore, children will need to think and reflect upon which of the events is historically important and which could be missed. This is to allow reflection upon the nature of history: we are always reading an edited version of events. As an extension, ask children to draw the linking lines on their timeline in different colours to reflect themes they can identify in the events. There is a box for a key on the timeline in the downloads for this article.

This lesson could be delivered via a trip to the National Railway Museum in York. The museum is part of the Science Museum group and offers a world class experience. You may also find a local heritage line or museum that can offer an exploration through steam trains too.

Assessment: Can all students construct a logical timeline? Have some evaluated the events they plotted onto their timelines? Have some identified logical themes to the events?

Week 4 – Factors in Industrial Revolution

Learning Objective: To reflect upon the importance of historical events.

Lesson Outline: In this lesson we will explore the causes of the Industrial Revolution and how trains were one of these factors. Start by discussing the vocabulary: do children know what a revolution is? Do they understand what Industrial means? Then discuss how our country changed from a rural farming economy to one built around cities. Watch the short video from the BBC’s History of the World series (see lesson presentation) and then discuss why cities became important to our nation. Answers are on the following slides.

The second half of this lesson involves children using Cornell Notes to summarise information. Cornell Notes (named after the university that invented them) is a systematic manner of creating notes. In the left hand column, children note key words (in this case, causes of the Industrial Revolution) and then pairs these with short notes in the larger right-hand column. The principle is that their notes should be half the size of what is on the board. Work through the slides, allowing time for note making. This is an activity that children find surprisingly engaging and is readily deployed in other lessons. You may wish to give children these key words ahead of time at the bottom of the sheet or pre-populating the left-hand column. For more details on Cornell Notes, see my previous article for teachPrimary on using them.

Children can then use their notes and the pictures included in the download to create a short summary of their conclusions.

Assessment: Have all children used evidence from their notes to support their conclusion? Can some children evaluate the evidential base for the conclusions of others?

Week 5 – Research (videos)

Learning Objective: To investigate the impact of historical events.

Lesson Outline: In this lesson we look at how the coming of trains had a huge impact on food production in the UK. How we moved from localised farming with regional variations to national level farming with counties specialising into one sort of crop. If not covered in prior learning, you may wish to discuss food security and how access to nutrition in past centuries was difficult and precarious.

For this penultimate lesson, you will need a copy of the BBC TV series Full Steam Ahead which can be purchased online or clips can be found on Youtube. For this lesson, children will be watching and making notes from Episodes 3 and 5. In Episode 3, children will learn about Sheep, Kippers, fish & chips and watercress. In Episode 5 they explore milk production. There is also an optional section on how branch lines worked.

We will be making use of the Cornell Notes skills from last lessons to create a new set collating information from the videos. You may wish to pre-populate some of the fields or use this as an opportunity to stretch the children’s skills by giving them a blank template. Next lesson, children will write about one type of food but will need to make notes on all of the foods as some are relevant to others or could be used as a point of comparison.

Work through the video clips, pausing between clips or as needed to allow for note taking. Most children will be able to watch and note take as their summary note taking requires fewer words on the page. Depending on lesson length, you may need to finish off the video watching next lesson.

Week 6 - Reflecting

Learning Objective: To evaluate the significance of historical events.

Lesson Outline: In this final lesson we reflect upon the impact of trains on our nation. Start by reflecting and revising from the notes made last lesson. What foods did week look at in the videos last lesson? How were they changed by trains? What do you think a regional food is?

Then allow the rest of the lesson to write up their conclusions from the video. This could be done as an essay style answer or you may wish to design your own worksheet to collect answers. As children write they should try to answer the following questions:

• How was your food made before trains arrived?

• Where in the UK would I have found it?

• What was the biggest change that trains made to your food?

• Did being able to send your food around the UK change the region it was from?

• Do we still eat this food today? Is it exactly the same? How has it changed?

If your children are not used to writing long form answers, you may wish to construct a class model example before children write independently. Another option could be for children to construct a poster or infographic about their chose food in pairs. 

Assessment: Have all children used evidence from their notes to explain their conclusions? Have some children used information from other foods to compare their food to?