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Building a canal

By Lois Francis

Objectives

To be able to use original documents to inform children's understanding of the cause and effect of events. (using doc D1180/2/72-3 and other resources related to the Stroudwater Navigation and the Thames and Severn Canal)

Knowledge

The children need to read through the document in stages, perhaps using magnifying glasses.

1. Give copies of the document to groups of children. Ask them to skim read the document with the following questions in mind:

What type of document is it?
Who produced it?
Do you know anything about the authors?
Why was it written?
When was it written?

Teacher collates and discusses children's ideas. Perhaps displays them to remind children.

Comprehension

2. Let the children now read through slowly and thoroughly. This time ask them to underline words and phrases which they think they understand.

Are there any words that they can substitute for modern words?
Can the children make any drawings to help them understand what the document is?

Class discussion or Envoys

So that frustration can be avoided, it might be useful at this point to, either come together and talk about the document, or to employ the idea of envoys, whereby one child from each group is chosen to visit another group and explain what has been discovered.

Application and Analysis

3. A discussion needs to be held now to introduce the idea of finding words from the text and assigning them to categories such as the following:

Names of people and/or companies.
Names of places.
Measurements.
Dates.
Jobs.

Within each category, there are investigations that could be pursued using other documents from the archive. But it is also essential for children to raise their own questions about the document, which could be done on separate pieces of paper and displayed so that they indicate a learning journey through the topic.

4. Names of places and/or companies

This is a great place to start as the Stroudwater Navigation came about through the interest of a number of local businessmen, who could see the advantages of transporting heavy loads by water, from the River Severn.

This is a crucial activity because the children need to be clear about the need for canals in the early 18th Century.

Children need copies of a sketch map that shows the topography of the area and the location of major industries of the 18th century. They then need to work in groups and to imagine themselves as engineers with the brief of transporting coal from the Forest of Dean or the Staffordshire coalfields to the town of Stroud. Each group would have to argue their ideas, perhaps using an overhead projector. A crucial link with science would be that children would have to understand the upthrust forces in water.

Finding reasons for a canal could also be achieved by using the thinking skill activity of mystery for the groups to solve.

Mysteries

The groups are given statements written on separate pieces of paper and by using the statements and the sketch map they would be able to construct arguments for the need for a canal. Some of the statements may not, obviously, be related to the problem but through the plenary discussion it should become apparent that all the statements are relevant.

Mystery Statements

The River Severn transports a lot of sand and sediment to its mouth where it is deposited and where sand banks are created by the swirling of the water.

The sandbanks change position in storms.

Ships can become stuck on sandbanks and so wind and water can destroy them.

The tide is so strong on the River Severn, it could take nine hours to sail from Frampton- On-Severn to Lydney.

The woollen mills in Stroud needed a lot of coal to power their mills.

People used to horses and carts to transport heavy materials over roads.

Roads became very muddy and badly rutted in winter.

Horses and carts cannot carry heavy loads.

By following the River Stroudwater (or Frome) the land slopes gently up towards Stroud, so that the canal would not need so many ways of keeping water at a constant level.

The businessmen wanted to make more money by using a canal to transport their products across the world.

Local people wanted work.

The city of Bristol had a great port which imported and exported products from and to other ports in the world.

America was a place that needed lots of products.

Synthesis and Evaluation

5. The children could become a company of directors and issue shares. To ensure that they were clear about their mission statement it would be necessary to investigate the 1730 Act for making the River Stroudwater Navigable.

The children could then use the following pictures to enable them to design:

A) The least expensive route
B) The quickest route

of the Stroudwater connecting a seaport with industrial towns.

A value would need to be assigned to the various features of a canal, for example:

Every lock has a rise of 3.3 metres, so that three locks are needed between each contour line.
Aqueducts cost £50 each kilometer or part of kilometer. They must only be 2km long. Rivers can be crossed by aqueducts or the river can be culverted under the canal as on the Gloucester and Sharpness canal.
Tunnels cost £60 per km or part of km.
The summit level (the highest part of the canal) has to be at least 10km long.

The Directors would have to write reports on the most suitable route for their canal, giving their arguments for and against each scheme, (literacy) with costings, (numeracy)

Presentations could be made to the class using sketch maps on OHPs.

Names of Places

Children can match the name of the places against the named plots on the map of the proposed route. Is each owner happy for the canal to pass through their land? How will it be of benefit to the individual owners? Is there an owner that would oppose the scheme? Why?
All these questions could be explored through drama or hotseating whereby children are interviewed by the class in role.

Children can compare maps of the current settlement by the canal with the map before the canal was built. What has been the effect of building the canal on the settlement of the area?
Is the effect still the same today or is modern settlement clustered around other features of the landscape?

Measurements

The children can make a scale model, using card, of the lock pit from the measurements given. What is the significance of a lock? What job does it do?

They can convert the measurements to metric.

The children can estimate the cost of building the Stroudwater Canal per mile.