This half term we will be learning about Walter Tull, who is a significant individual from history. We will be learning about his life and how he went from being a professional footballer to a solider in World War One! We will also find out about the struggles and discrimination he faced throughout his life. In our first lesson, we discussed when Walter Tull lived and then used photos of him as sources of evidence to make inferences about his jobs. We also made comparisons between army and football uniform then and now. We are looking forward to finding out more 

This week, we used a timeline to plot the key events throughout Walter's life. We learnt more about his childhood and how he was raised in a children's home with his brother, before his brother was adopted by a family who lived in Scotland. We discussed how some events in his childhood are happy and some are more difficult, and talked about how we all experience these ups and downs in our lives.

We have been applying our knowledge of football in 1910 by making comparisons between what it was like then and what it is like now. We used sources of information to study the football boots, the kit, the stadiums, the pitch and the football! We could discuss what it might have been like for footballers like Walter Tull and thought about how things have changed through the last 100 years. 

This week, we focused on a specific football match which took place in Bristol, where Walter Tull was verbally abused by fans based on the colour of his skin. Following this, he was demoted to the reserve team of Tottenham Hotspur. One journalist wrote an article supporting Walter, but most people were against him. We talked about how Walter may have felt after this experience and wrote some questions that we would like to ask him. We recapped on the protected characteristic 'race', which means that you cannot discriminate against somebody based on the colour of their skin. We talked about racism in football and how this is still happening today, although it is dealt with very differently now. A super lesson of learning - well done Rufford Class! 

This lesson, we learnt more about Walter's experiences when he was in the army. We learnt about the batallion specifically for footballers and then talked about how he found the experience, finding out that he had to leave the army and go home for a few months because he was so traumatised by what he had seen. We then learnt that, on returning to the army, Walter was made an officer and spent more time making plans for other soldiers. We talked about the truce between the soldiers on Christmas Day and then how Walter died crossing No Man's Land aged just 29.