This terms integrated focus was a really big one. We focused on the Ballarat Gold Rush and Eureka Stockade. I learnt lots from what it was like on the Gold Rush to what happened on the night they stormed eureka. (That’s a book by the way and I will tell you more about that later on).

The reason that people went to the gold rush was usually to have a chance to struck it rich with gold. another reason is only if you came from Ireland and this is the potato famine. The potato famine is when people 1 ran out of potatoes but 2 barely had enough food for themselves or family. This is something that I learned i this unit. I also learned lots of important dates including. 1770, first European sighting of Australia, 1835, early gold findings, 1848, California gold rush, 1851, Australian gold rush and most importantly was 1854 which was the eureka stockade then there was 1858, welcome nugget was found. 

I also learned what the eureka stockade was. It was a fight between the soldiers (police) and the miners because they couldn’t afford their mining licenses and that they weren’t treated fairly. They couldn’t vote or anything. Only people who owned a certain amount of property could vote. They built a big stockade from trees and branches to defend themselves from the soldiers who at night stormed the stockade and killed around 27 miners and 7 soldiers. Later on the miners won the case in court and finally got rights.

Some important figures of the time were Peter Lalor who was one of the main diggers helping to defend against the soldiers in the battle. James Bentley who owned the eureka hotel and bought his way out of jail after killing James Scobie. He killed James because he broke a window at his hotel. James eventually went to jail. 

After we learned all about the gold rush and eureka stockade at camp (sovereign hill) we came back to school and started our dioramas. We had already been put into groups and assigned buildings to make. I was with Dillon who helped me build the Gold Office. We used a box and painted it white, then we put in some wallpaper and most importantly a lot of gold! We had safes, chairs, benches, gold blocks (nuggets) and gold in jars. At the gold office you can trade gold that you’d found or got for money.

We had to make a newspaper in our integrated unit but we usually did it in literacy. I made mine about Master William Brown and how he had burned down the gold office. We also had to do some small stories on the side of the newspaper. I made mine about how they had 30% off at the hope bakery and how a Japanese person changed the gold prices from pounds to yen! This was a lot of fun. By doing this we learned the important features both written and structural of a newspaper. We also learned a bit about the language we had to use. Not a whole different language like Chinese but what way we would say something.

In maths we both did things based on our integrated unit and just our normal maths. We made a birds eye view map of our diorama with grid references, key(legend), compass and scale. We then got to make a video about how to get from one place to another in mathematical language. We also learned a lot about volume. I was really excited after this because now I finally know how to calculate the volume of a sphere. Think how many things that I could calculate the volume of in real life now! We also did a angles unit where we learned about each of the different types of angles. I learned about vertically opposite angles, corresponding angles and more. 

My class and I have used so many of the PLA’s and I think that we could’ve used the all, of them but here are some of the main ones. We used a lot of creativity when we had to design our building. We had pictures to reference to but we had to make somethings up though keeping it historically accurate. We also had to use resilience. This was because when we were building our dioramas not everything always went to plan. We had to change our plan if this happened. 

‘The Night They Stormed Eureka’ is a book by Jackie French. It is about this girl who basically went back in time to when the gold rush was happening. She was taken into a family. She always knew what was going to happen like the exact night that the eureka stockade was because she had learnt about it in her history class. I won’t say any more before I spoil the book though.

I’ve had a great term and have really enjoyed learning about the Gold Rush and eureka stockade.

What important people do you know of from the 1850s (Gold Rush/ eureka stockade)?