Keystage history - Imaginative History Teaching in Primary and Secondary Schools
About Keystage History
Keystage history is the home of best practice in primary and secondary history teaching and learning. You can totally trust the up-to-date, authoritative, cutting edge, expert advice on issues such as deep dive inspections and you will be inspired by all the creative planning and teaching ideas. Subscribers love the hundreds of fully resourced history lessons, all judged outstanding by a vastly experienced LA history adviser who has observed over 2,000 primary and secondary lessons and has carried out 60 national inspections for OFSTED. Every aspect of leading history 5-19 is covered in detail from rationales for curriculum planning, through to raising standards, assessment, progression and inspiring colleagues. This site is a must for any forward-looking subject leader.
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Teaching Mary Seacole to Key Stage 1
Mary Seacole's inclusion might be regarded by some as tokenism. That would be unfair. The site also features work on Rosa Parks and others. The reason Mary is included is mainly because it helps children to understand that there are...more
Mary Seacole – KQ1 – How can we work out why Mary Seacole is famous?
This session focuses on working out WHY Mary Seacole is commemorated today 200 years after she was born, and looks at the different ways in which she is remembered. The debate about whether she, or Florence Nightingale , better deserves...more
Mary Seacole – KQ2 – What were the most important events in Mary’s life?
Pupils watch a short film to establish the outlines of the story and then have to sequence a differentiated set of images of the key events of her life. They finish by discussing which events were the most significant in...more
Mary Seacole – KQ3 – What was Mary’s greatest achievement and how do we know?
The focus here is mainly on the evidence for Mary’s achievement. This is important as she was a more-or-less forgotten figure for 200 years. So how do we know that claims about Mary’s life are true? The skill of finding...more
Mary Seacole – KQ4 – How did life change for Mary after the Crimean war?
Pupils create a fortunes graph showing the highs and lows of Mary’s life after the Crimea, identify a key turning point in her fortunes, and then consider ways in which Mary was helped when she fell on hard times.moreObjectives
- Pupils...
Mary Seacole – KQ5 – What made Mary so special?
A short session aimed at generating adjectives to capture the special qualities that Mary had and to provide examples of where she exhibited those characteristics.moreLearning objectives
- Pupils can list at least 3 adjectives to describe her distinctive character - Pupils understand...
Mary Seacole – KQ6 – Why doesn’t everyone agree that Mary deserves her statue at St.Thomas’ hospital?
This lesson places pupils in the role of Mantle of the Expert. A new monument to Mary Seacole was erected outside St Thomas Hospital in 2016 . But there have been complaints. Surely it was Florence who was associated with...more
How to get KS1 pupils into history-13 ideas
If you haven't already come across this School Run website offers 13 different ideas for making history come alive with your pupils, including games, story books, visits, history re-enactments etc. What i like about the list...more
Common assessment tasks in history at KS1
It is often difficult knowing how to assess pupils’ historical thinking at KS1. Are we simply testing literacy and /or recall? But what about historical understanding? Faced with this problem, I have been working with two large London primary schools....more
Medium-term planning for history at Key Stage 1
This part of the site contains a dozen detailed fully-developed enquiry-led, key question-driven medium term plans for all the major KS1 history -led topics. They have all been judged to be outstanding by an experienced OFSTED history inspector. All the...more
Teaching Mary Seacole to Key Stage 1
Mary Seacole's inclusion might be regarded by some as tokenism. That would be unfair. The site also features work on Rosa Parks and others. The reason Mary is included is mainly because it helps children to understand that there are...moreMary Seacole – KQ1 – How can we work out why Mary Seacole is famous?
This session focuses on working out WHY Mary Seacole is commemorated today 200 years after she was born, and looks at the different ways in which she is remembered. The debate about whether she, or Florence Nightingale , better deserves...moreMary Seacole – KQ2 – What were the most important events in Mary’s life?
Pupils watch a short film to establish the outlines of the story and then have to sequence a differentiated set of images of the key events of her life. They finish by discussing which events were the most significant in...more
Teaching Mary Seacole to Key Stage 1
Mary Seacole's inclusion might be regarded by some as tokenism. That would be unfair. The site also features work on Rosa Parks and others. The reason Mary is included is mainly because it helps children to understand that there are...moreMary Seacole – KQ1 – How can we work out why Mary Seacole is famous?
This session focuses on working out WHY Mary Seacole is commemorated today 200 years after she was born, and looks at the different ways in which she is remembered. The debate about whether she, or Florence Nightingale , better deserves...moreMary Seacole – KQ2 – What were the most important events in Mary’s life?
Pupils watch a short film to establish the outlines of the story and then have to sequence a differentiated set of images of the key events of her life. They finish by discussing which events were the most significant in...more
Beyond Face Value KQ4 Why did Ford Madox Brown paint this detailed picture of a scene that never existed?
This lesson revolves around a single painting entitled Work, painted by Ford Madox Brown between 1852 and 1865. Using Fastest Finger First pupils are encouraged to explore the full detail of this fascinating painting before role playing the wealth of...more
Ten things your KS2 pupils should know about language and communication in the ancient world.
This article should inform your teaching of the Ancient Civilizations topic Imagine a world without writing-without any writing at all: no literature; no news stories; no history even. No tax returns! Well that was the world about 5000 year ago. And...more
12 things you need to know about the Mayan civilization before you teach it at KS2
1.In the year 1000 settlements like Chichen Itza were among the largest settlements anywhere in the world. Tikal was thought to have a population as large as 60,000. 2. Chichen Itza is probably the best preserved on any city in the...more
Evaluating websites in history at KS3-5: 3 pieces of top advice
Students are too trusting of what they read on the Internet. Most striking, they implicitly trust Google to verify sources for them--whatever Google lists first must be a good source. As we know, many are there because they paid to...more
What can you do at KS3 to make your history curriculum more representative?
In a recent article for the Historical Association ( HA news- Autumn 2020) Jake Subryan Richards offers his advice: " For teachers it is at KS3 where there is most flexibility. Stress the interconnections between Britain and the wider world, supported...more
Indian Mutiny/rebellion of 1857
This lesson is aimed at Y9/GCSE students. It addresses three principal aspects of history teaching:more- How to be thoughtful and discriminating when selecting evidence that is relevant to answering two different questions on the same topic.
- How to explore the...
New evidence of Anglo-Saxon mutilations as punishment
Ninth-century England was a bad place to be a criminal, new findings suggest. The skull of an Anglo-Saxon teenager discovered in Hampshire shows that she had her nose and upper lip cut off and may have been scalped too.Written evidence of...moreEvaluating websites in history at KS3-5: 3 pieces of top advice
Students are too trusting of what they read on the Internet. Most striking, they implicitly trust Google to verify sources for them--whatever Google lists first must be a good source. As we know, many are there because they paid to...more
Terror of the Tramp: Why did vagrancy become such an important issue in Elizabethan England?
GCSE lesson in which students work through a range of differentiated clues to work out 8 reasons which help answer the lessons’ enquiry question before evaluating how well a recent textbook explains it. So often I have seen this lesson taught...more
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About Me
Neil acts as an educational consultant for history for schools throughout the country. After teaching for 12 years, during which time he ran two departments and was a member of the Senior Leadership, Neil moved into advisory work,
For 18 years, he supported 70 secondary and 450 primary and special schools in Hampshire during which time he carried out over 60 national OFSTED inspections. More recently he has been heavily involved in running about 40 highly acclaimed national training courses a year for primary and secondary history teachers, as well as bespoke whole staff INSET days in primary schools.
