Text 1: Why my class learns in the mud, by Ruth Penbury

An original contemporary blog.

Every Thursday, whatever the weather, my Year 2 class pulls on waterproofs and walks the ten minutes from our school gate to a patch of beech wood behind the allotments. For the next three hours, that wood is our classroom.

We don’t abandon the curriculum. We just move it outside. Last week the children measured fallen branches with lengths of string and sorted them from shortest to longest. They have written poems about the noise of rain on a tarpaulin, and they count in fives by stacking pine cones in little towers.

Some lessons only the wood can teach. With an adult beside them, the children learn to whittle a stick with a potato peeler, always pushing the blade away from the body. They build dens from branches and old sheets, and they argue, then compromise, about whose design will survive the wind. Before lunch we light a small fire with a flint and steel, and toast crumpets on hazel sticks.

Parents sometimes worry about the mud. I understand. But I have watched a boy who barely spoke in class explain to a visiting governor, at great length, how to tell a slug from a snail. That is worth a muddy coat.

Text 2: The half-time school at Brook Mill, by Nathaniel Fairbrass

An original inspector’s report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from a report published in 1863, a schools inspector describes a visit to a school attached to a cotton mill, where the children worked half the day in the mill and spent the other half at lessons.

The school is held in a long room above the mill counting-house, and its scholars are half-timers: they work in the mill from six until half past twelve and come to their lessons at two, or the reverse in the following week. When I entered, some forty of them were seated at desks, many with the cotton fluff still in their hair.

The master, Mr Sledmere, was drilling the upper class in their tables in readiness for my examination, the whole class chanting ‘seven sevens are forty-nine’ in a single voice, while the younger children copied a line of large letters from the blackboard onto their slates: ‘Idleness is the mother of want.’

I then heard the first class read a lesson on the reindeer. They read it fluently enough, but when I asked a boy what a reindeer was he could not tell me, and I found afterwards that they had read the same page every afternoon for a month. Meanwhile the girls of the sewing class hemmed dusters for the mill.

What struck me most was their weariness. During the dictation I watched a girl of ten pinch her own arm, again and again, to keep her eyes open, and the master, who knows the hours they keep, pretended not to see. ‘They come to me tired, sir,’ he said. ‘I do what I can with what is left of them.’

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what the children did during their lessons.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.