In Year Five this term our Integrated unit has been The Hard Road Ahead. The Hard Road Ahead is a Unit on the Australian Gold Rush and The Eureka Stockade. As part of this unit we have been to Sovereign Hill, (Click here to see my blog post on Sovereign Hill.) and made a mini-sovereign hill. It has been a really fun experience.

Over the course of the unit, I have learned lots about life in the 1850s. I had no idea that they lived in such a strict and harsh society. Nothing out of the ordinary was acceptable, and that was that. I hadn’t realised that the licence hunts got so violent and brutal.

When we made the dioramas, we learned a lot about business on the Ballarat goldfields. The business that my partner and I chose to create was The Ballarat Times, the local newspaper on the diggings. Our shop was connected to C. Spencer, the lolly shop, so we were able to create that too. My partner was able to 3D Print some small containers for our replica Sovereign Hill Raspberry Drops to go into. We made the raspberry drops by scrunching up small scraps of red cellophane into the drops.

While we were doing the unit, we also learned a little about goldfield language. On the goldfields, there were some unusual substitutes for regular words like Traps and Joes, which meant troopers and police, and nugget or vein, which were different ways that you might find gold. Veins are long and skinny streaks of gold found inside quartz rock, whereas nuggets are small prisms of gold that you can find inside rock. And the most common form of gold is a flake, which you can find by panning in the river.

During the unit, I have used many PLAs. When we made the dioramas of Ballarat businesses, we all had to use the PLAs of communication and collaboration. When we went on Sovereign Hill Camp we had to use resilience and courage, and when we were learning in the classroom we had to use knowledge reflection and communication.

Overall, The Hard Road Ahead was a great unit, full of complications, interesting activities and lots of opportunities for learning. It was also a difficult unit, dealing with sickness music lessons and general absence, but it was really enjoyable in the end.