Last week Year 5 visited the Ku-ring-gai Historical Society and Gordon Library as part of their current Literacy unit on informative writing. The aim was to engage the boys in the local area and provide them with an authentic and purposeful use of both these fantastic resources. Across the grade, the boys are researching into a number of local places with the end goal of presenting, to Ku-ring-gai Council, an innovative way of sharing this information.   

Their initial searches of the internet threw up some interesting results. There were many links with Newington College in the local area, including the fact that William Hardy Wilson, the architect of Eryldene House and designer of the Stanmore War memorial was an Old Newingtonian. Also, Claude Ronald Morley who fought in World War I was a boy at Newington as was his father. Whilst another group discovered a link between some bricks presented to our School in 1988 and Captain Arthur Phillip’s family home in Lyndhurst, Hampshire UK.   

The boys have been using their group work skills to assign roles and share the load when investigating the following local areas:  

St Ives Showground 

Ku-ring-gai Wildflower Gardens 

Swain Gardens 

Seven Little Australians National Park 

Two Creeks Track 

Gordon Library 

Eryldene Historic House and Garden 

Newington College 

Lindfield Soldiers Memorial Park 

Thrilled about what they were discovering online, the visit to the Historical Society was even more exciting as it provided actual documents that they could search through. While difficult to wade through all these primary resources, it gave the boys a real sense of digging into the past :   

“I found out about Arthur Swain’s daughter and that she and other volunteers helped to restore and preserve the garden after he died.”  Matthew A   

“I found that my family has a connection with Eryldene House.” Callan G  

The boys look forward to sharing their findings in a future edition of Prep Talk. 

 Phil Trethewey and Pascal Czerwenka – Year 5 Teachers