Teaching Grace Darling to Key Stage 1

Summer 2020 saw the launch of the updated Grace Darling topic resources. We have removed all out-dated resources that the teachers originally used and have provided a complete set of 6 enquiry-driven lessosn which drive from an excellent medium-term plan which you can find in the planning section of the site
In this series of KS1 outstanding history lessons you will find excellent coverage of all the important historical skills and knowledge that children need to develop. These lessons are given coherence as a teaching sequence by an excellent and detailed medium-term plan which can be found in the planning section. All the lessons relate to the Grace Darling plan and are identified by their key question.
This topic of Grace Darling and her rescue has worked brilliantly over the past 20 years. Not only does it offer a clear, immediate and simple story-line, it also allows pupils to enter another pre-electric, per-motorised pre-digital world, so useful work can be done on similarity and difference as well as motivation. Unusually for a Y1 topic teaching Grace Darling offers great scope for work on interpretations as one of the outstanding lessons so tellingly shows.
This is the first lesson on an enquiry into Grace Darling: what she did, and why she was famous. The kernel of the lesson is a slow reveal activity which works really well on an Interactive White Board. The key image comes from the...
This Year 1 lesson on historical interpretations starts with a stark comparison of 2 images of the rescue showing very different detail. Pairs of pupils are then given 1 of 5 other picture versions which they have to turn into a mime to highlight...
This last key question of 6 on the medium-term planning, focuses on her legacy and why we should commemorate her. It introduces pupils to a number of ways in which people are remembered before inviting them to use their creative imaginations to come up...