Year 8 have read that mill children worked as piecers and scavengers, but the textbook's 1835 engraving of a mule room shows the machine standing still. On the board the teacher plays a three-minute museum film from YouTube of a restored spinning mule at work: the carriage, carrying hundreds of spindles, rolls out about a metre and a half, drawing and twisting the threads, then runs back in as the yarn winds on, several times a minute, with the noise of the room on the soundtrack. The teacher plays it through once, then again at quarter speed using YouTube's playback setting, stopping it with the carriage fully out to ask where a child would stand to join a snapped thread, and how long a scavenger had to sweep up the cotton fluff underneath before the carriage came back. Students sketch the mule from above in their books, mark the piecer's and scavenger's positions and the carriage's path, and write three sentences on why mill owners gave these jobs to children and what made them dangerous.
This page is one of a growing set of PICRAT examples by cell, subject and grade. Page maintained by Andy Perryer.