History for 6th Class

The eras outcome from the Normans to 1798, after a first lesson that sets all six eras on one line so that no class depends on an earlier year's course. The thread is the land and who held it, and every lesson reads its sources for whose power they served. Conquest and dispossession are stated plainly, never as a grievance to inherit.

The 1800s through ordinary people and the records they left: the penny a month that won Emancipation, the census counts that show the Famine, emigrants' letters home, an emigrant girl whose story was told two ways for a century, the long change from tenants to owners, and the Irish language on the street and in the census. The Famine is met through the record, never through pictures of suffering.

Independence, partition and civil war, taught honestly through documents ordinary people signed, voted on and argued over: the Ulster Covenant and the Proclamation, the widening of the vote, the First Dáil's first day, the Treaty debate, what the new state changed on the street, and the Constitution the people voted for in 1937. Northern Ireland is handled factually and calmly; the fighting is stated, never detailed; no side is the class's to inherit.

The political system outcome at greater depth: who decides what, and what checks them. Who made our public holidays, what the people decide by referendum, the two votes of 22 May 1998, a three-seat count with a quota, who can stop a law, and what changed when Ireland joined Europe. Every lesson works from the Constitution's words and real records; no party, politician or position is praised or blamed.

The wider-world scale. The Maya in depth, then the lives of peoples across time told in their own words: Irish Travellers since the 1960s, and the Choctaw people's gift to Ireland in 1847 and how two peoples remember it. The year closes where the class stands, on what its school's record should keep about its years there.