English

The Ipswich Heritage Education Kit provides examples of historic writing throughout all of the kits available on Picture Ipswich, as well as examples of photographs, advertisements, maps and diagrams that can be used to investigate language choices that are made in each of these written forms.

Trove is also a valuable resource available for historic sources. It has a digital record of most Australian newspapers that are no longer covered by copyright, but there is also a range of other sources that have become public domain and archived webpages.

Imaginative Writing

Inspire students' creative writing with Picture Ipswich's vast collection of images.  What stories could they tell?

• Find an image of an individual or family and have students write from their perspective.  Possible images could include:
  • A family photographed standing in front of their house in the late 1890s.  They could be sending the photo overseas to tell family and friends about their new life in Ipswich.
  • A student at a boarding school could be writing to their family, telling them about their experiences at school.
  • A solider writing home from the front.
• Select a random photo (try out our Surprise Me button), or one related to your current teaching area.  Students can use this as a prompt for writing their own short or micro story. This could include writing the story that led up to the image being taken, using the location represented in the image as a setting for their own story or imagining what the lives of the people in the image may have been like.
• Using the People & Families collection, students could write a short biography or an obituary for a past Ipswich resident

Persuasive writing

• There are a range of advertisements on Picture Ipswich that can be used for either analysing advertising techniques in real life examples or as inspiration for students who are to develop their own advertisements
• The Ipswich Punch was a satirical magazine that was published in the late 1800s that includes examples of a range of writing styles that students could use as examples or in their practice of analysing different text types, this includes poetry, political cartoons, letters to the editor and reviews of entertainment that had occurred in the city. Due to The Punch being a historic publication there are some sensitive topics and stereotypes within it that may have to be worked around depending on the age of the students involved.
• Defining Tulmur has a range of categories that provide different aspects of Ipswich history that can be used to facilitate debate or encourage students to write a persuasive text. This includes:
  • examples of historic architecture from throughout our history that students can debate for or against the preservation of
  • Major debates that have occurred throughout Ipswich's history that can be replicated in the classroom
  • Census data for Ipswich that can be used as evidence in persuasive texts that focus on different aspects of population and culture change within the city
  • Arguments for or against change in different areas of their own lives compared to those who lived in the city in the past.

Informative writing

• For a journalism activity, have students select a past Event (e.g. flood), and write / perform either a newspaper article, a television or radio broadcast, or a blog (try to match the method with the time period, e.g. 1893 floods would have been reported in the paper).
• Look at examples of real estate ads online and then have students select a heritage home from the Architecture collection and write their own descriptive real estate ad, identifying the architectural style of the house and including some of the house's history, if known.
• Select a random photo, or one related to your current teaching area.  Have students write a caption describing the image, in the style of a newspaper or magazine caption.  Students would need to provide the who, what, where, and when in the caption.
  • Extension exercise: add the how by writing a description of the image

These are just a few examples of how you could use Picture Ipswich in English classes.  If you have further suggestions, please add them as a Recollection on this page.