The textbook makes general claims about industrial towns, and Year 8 test them against their own. Before the lesson the teacher has loaded a Google Sheet with the 1851 census for the whole township, about 6,000 people, from FreeCEN's free transcription where it covers the town or from the local family history society: one row each, with street, household number, name, relationship to the head, age, sex, occupation and birthplace, as the enumerator recorded them. Each pair gets its own copy and one claim to test: that children under ten worked, that most adults had moved in from somewhere else, that houses were overcrowded, or that married women went out to work. Pairs filter and sort the columns and count the rows that match. Each pair then puts a question of its own to the data that its first count raised, such as whether the child workers lived in households born outside the county, or which streets held the most lodgers. Pairs report both counts with one household as an example, the class decides which claims hold for its town, and students write a verdict in their books.
Tools: Google Sheets Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
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