PUPILS in a Burnley school can't wait to start work on our NIE local history project, "East Lancashire from the Stone Age to the Space Age," especially as many of the worksheets in the pack have been written by their own teachers.

Leslie Riley and Alan Parker, from Rosehill Junior School, Burnley, have spent weeks researching and writing the material, along with Les Hardy, head of history at Park High School, Colne, funded by the Teacher Placement Service at East Lancs Education Business Partnerships.

The junior pupils gave a big "thumbs up" to their teacher's holiday work at a sneak preview of the worksheets and free book for every participating school. Comments on the worksheets ranged from, "Can I starting using this now?" This looks like fun and is more interesting than an ordinary school book," to "We can cover our history project project with this," and "I know this place, but it has changed over time."

For one of the worksheet's authors, Lesley Riley, this was her second writing placement with our newspaper; two years ago she produced material published in our NIE supplement, "Spotlight on the Century."

"I find the projects really interesting," she explained, "and it's good to know that this material will help other teachers to cover National Curriculum work not only in history, but literacy and numeracy as well."

Copies of the book, "Images of East Lancashire," written by Eric Leaver and worth £16.99 will be given free of charge to schools ordering the local history resource. The book features hundreds of photographs from our newspaper archives, with detailed captions recording over a century of change.

The Burnley youngsters were particularly fascinated by the book's pictures and details of their own town which provoked lively discussion on long-gone features and the efforts of town planners to "improve" the area.

"It shows how buildings used to be," said one boy, "and how roads and traffic have changed over the years." "I can recognise the shape of some buildings," said another, "even though the surroundings are now quite different." "Where was this theatre?" demanded a young lady, "And why was it knocked down instead of using the building for something else?" The questions continue........

In addition to the book and worksheets, the material includes a class set of supplements written by author and broadcaster, Ron Freethy, giving a taste of life and times of our locality from the pre-historic period to the present day.

A delivery of our newspaper into schools from October 4-8, completes the resource, with even more local history features and competitions offering great prizes of books and software from Dorling Kindersley.

And as if that's not enough, every school ordering the material before the end of September will be entered in a prize draw for superb educational software.

Up for grabs for secondary schools is a year's subscription to "Course Discover" CD Roms from ECCTIS 2000, worth £250. The five disks give updated information on over 10,000 university and college courses throughout the country.

Primary schools have a change to win a set of Dorling Kindersley's Learning Ladder software covering maths, reading and writing, plus the Starting to Read CD Roms from Europress.

But don't forget that the extensive local history resource plus all its additional free material, is available only from our newspaper and must be ordered by the end of September.

Details and an order form have been delivered to all schools within our circulation area, or can be obtained from NIE Co-ordinator Rita Shaw, tel 01254 678678 ext 255, or fax 01254 680429.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.