Teaching KS3 History: Early Modern History

>>NEW LESSONS ADDED MAY AND MARCH 2011

The following Key Stage 3 history lessons for teaching Early Modern History 1500 -1750 have all been judged to be outstanding according to OFSTED criteria. You will find a wide variety of teaching and learning activities and full lesson plans as well as a rich array of teaching resources including PowerPoint® presentations.  

Most lessons in this Early Modern History section focus on the late 16th and 17th centuries. It is taken as read that pupils will come from Key Stage 2 with a reasonably secure knowledge of the characters of Henry VIII and Elizabeth. You can see examples of outstanding Key Stage 2 lessons on Tudor Britain here.  It will be necessary to revisit the last post-Armada years of Elizabeth's reign to  pick up the threads of religious and political unrest. The activities featured in these lessons involve pupils in: critiquing an oversimplified analogy diagram before creating their own; advising a film director; working on a history mystery; presenting a court case; and using data to raise and answer tricky historical questions.

KS3 Outstanding History Lessons

• ADDED MAY 2011 Elizabeth I portraits - things aren’t what they seem  Designed originally for able KS2 pupils this works ideally with middle-end and lower attaining Y8 pupils.  A really excellent and engaging lesson (with PowerPoint and other resources) exploring why Elizabeth 1's portraits seem to show her growing younger as she got older.
• ADDED MARCH 2011 English Civil War enquiry; was the last year of the war more about sieges than pitched battles?  This Year 8 enquiry lesson taught to a group of higher ability pupils invites them to wrestle with a set of statistics from which they have to detect patterns before questioning the validity of the source itself.
• ADDED JANUARY 2011 Did the Great Fire really end the Great Plague of 1665? In this engaging one-lesson enquiry pupils look carefully at statistics and maps in order to challenge received opinion.
• Parchment in the flames- the World turned Upside Down. A fascinating lesson which becomes progressively more challenging as pupils annotate, classify, date and then caption a familiar post-Civil War image which the textbooks often get wrong.  Great ideas for differentiation too.
• The Reformation: did people really do what they were told and change their religion quite so quickly? Pupils enjoy using original local sources to challenge over-simplified text book accounts..
• Why did father fight against son in the English Civil War? A case study of the Verney family in the form of  history mystery and a missing letter.
• Can you persuade a jury that Mary Tudor does not deserve the title Bloody? Sure fire winner of a lesson in which pupils are active from start to finish.
• Why were so many witches hanged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?  This lesson starts with pupils raising their own questions to help shape their enquiry.  Great thinking skills activity which encourages independence.

Want to know what's coming next? Click here.
 

Teaching UK 1500-1750 to Key Stage 3
 

Although the old designation of the unit is retained here you will find that the dates are used rather loosely. This reflects the thrust of the new curriculum orders for 2008, with their encouragement to range across periods, to build clearer overviews of the past.  The three intertwined political and religious crises of the Reformation, the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution are the centre pieces.  The lessons here on the Reformation challenge the oversimplified rollercoaster idea using accessible church records to give the lesson a genuine feel of real enquiry.  The reign of Mary Tudor finds pupils in role as advocates trying to get her off the charge of being 'bloody'.  The causes of the English Civil War are dealt with very imaginatively by looking at the Verneys - a family divided - where the father dies at the hands of a Parliament his son supports.  To lighten this rather heavy diet of constitutional history, there are wonderful enquiry lessons on witchcraft and on the Great Fire and Plague.  Plenty of opportunities for comparisons across time and place are offered by means of the executions of Charles I and Louis XVI and by contrasting Cromwell with Robespierre. Lessons for these are in preparation.

In his latest book called God's Executioner, Michael O Siochru relates an interesting anecdote. Paying a courtesy call on the British foreign secretary Robin Cook in 1997, the Irish prime Minister Bertie Ahern noticed a painting of Oliver Cromwell in the room. He instantly walked out and refused to return until the portrait of  " that murdering b*****rd" had been removed. O Siochru rather predictably  concludes that he was not a monster, but he did commit monstrous acts. In his review in the Sunday Times John Carey likens Cromwell's justification about his actions at Drogheda to the killing of  Japanese civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would save lives in the long run. What would pupils make of this justification?

Great resources to give you even better ideas

When teaching the Civil War, how about using the National Archives Learning Curve's excellent podcasts? If you want pupils to go in role and to empathise with the characters, these short film clips would not only stimulate interest they would also show how careful the actors have been to base what they say on historical evidence from sources. Also on the Learning Curve site there is a brilliant document which sets out the grievances of Parliament in 1640. It is clear enough for pupils to follow, especially as the site provides a spoken commentary too. This would be great to project onto the Interactive Whiteboard screen and for pupils to come to the front to highlight in different colour  pens the various grievances. It really makes the subject come alive to see the complaints handwritten not pre-processed by the textbooks. You can see a copy of the document in the image gallery.

Up next

• Execution of King Charles: advising the film director. An exercise in analysing and evaluating sources and interpretations
• Put out the flags : we're studying the UK. Flags and  song lyrics give this lessons a novel twist.
• Cromwell. Why does he remain so hard to understand?
  
  
  If you would like to preview sample activities and resources from these lessons, then email us and we will forward some draft material prior to formal publication here.

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