Year 5 - Abraham Darby - penny pinching profiteer or brilliant boss?

There is nothing like a good enquiry question to spark a debate and discussion and this is exactly what Year 5 were doing last week in History.

Grouped together in pairs and foursomes the children read a number of historical sources that provided evidence in finding the solution.

There were photos of buildings such as Holy Trinity Church, Ironbridge, which was in fact built and paid for by the Darby family in a bid to teach their workers about God.

There were many other statements by witnesses who commented both positively and negatively about the Darby family, paintings to view, photos of the Darby houses and much more.

Mr Abraham Darby 111 was a hard taskmaster and if his employees overslept and failed to arrive at the foundry by 05.00am, the poor person was dragged from his bed, pulled downstairs and put into a wheelbarrow. From this point he was unceremoniously trundled in the wheelbarrow to his workplace whilst a group of folks rattled tin cans, played whistles and banged on saucepans so that everyone could look on at the shameless ‘good for nothing.’

The children read to one another, discussed where the positives were or the unfairness …and using creativity and their own individual style, each group produced a poster to illustrate their findings.

You can see one or two of the posters below but everyone worked really hard and it was a good way of using knowledge gained from our recent residential in Ironbridge.