How can we possibly know about the Wright Brothers first flight when there’s nobody alive now who saw it?
This is a question about evidence, one which makes pupils consider how we know for sure about the past. Their thinking needs to be developed beyond ‘it says so in a book’. So after an initial pooling of ideas, prompted by who might have been there? and who might have recorded what happened? the first task asks pupils to consider 10 statements made about the first flight. These are provided at Resource Sheet 1. (The answers are on Resource sheet 1a!)
Learning objectives
- Pupils are able to work out which evidence is likely to have survived.
- They can then accurately match statements to the evidence provided. The more able to go further to work out which is the strongest evidence.
Pupils then have to work out which source of evidence supports the statements. In other words, How do we know this really happened? The activity is called Prove it! Slides 2-7 are printed off onto A4 paper and placed around the room as if in an art gallery, giving pupils space to look at them in small groups. You can of
