Grace Darling Lessons and Resources KS1
Teaching Grace Darling to Y1 in KS1 history
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.
Planner, assessment task and knowledge organiser
| Grace Darling Key Questions | Historical focus |
|---|---|
| Grace Darling – KQ1 – Setting up the enquiry – What did Grace do that made her famous …and why is she remembered today? | Causation and motivation and Significance and evaluation |
| Grace Darling – KQ2 – Why did Grace Darling act in the way she did? | Causation and motivation |
| Grace Darling – KQ3 – Did Grace Darling really carry out the brave rescue on her own? | Historical enquiry and understanding |
| Grace Darling – KQ4 – How do we know about Grace Darling’s actions which happened so long ago? | Historical evidence and sources |
| Grace Darling – KQ5 – How did sea rescue improve as a result of Grace Darling’s story? | Consequence and impact |
| Grace Darling – KQ6 – How should we remember Grace Darling? | Significance and evaluation |
Grace Darling end of unit quiz – KS1
Grace Darling is remembered for doing something very brave a long time ago. She helped others in a time of danger and became a well-known figure in history. In this…
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Grace Darling – assessment task
Focus: Interpretations Y1 Pupils compare contrasting images of Graces’ rescue and try to explain how and why they are different. Assessment task Subscribers only: You must be logged in to view…
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Grace Darling knowledge organiser – KS1
You are learning about Grace Darling because at a young age she carried out a brave rescue and saved 9 men from a shipwreck. She was the daughter of a…
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Grace Darling – KQ1 – Setting up the enquiry – What did Grace do that made her famous …and why is she remembered today?
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…
Read MoreGrace Darling – KQ2 – Why did Grace Darling act in the way she did?
An active lesson in which pupils generate adjectives and then use a Diamond-4 ranking activity, followed by hot seating, to ascertain Grace’s motivation. A broader context is achieved by asking…
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Grace Darling – KQ3 – Did Grace Darling really carry out the brave rescue on her own?
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…
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Grace Darling – KQ4 – How do we know about Grace Darling’s actions which happened so long ago?
There are two distinct elements to this session. Firstly, pupils develop a sense of period and of evidence by thinking about the sources historians would use to find out about…
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Grace Darling – KQ5 – How did sea rescue improve as a result of Grace Darling’s story?
This session comprises 2 principal activities: matching descriptions of lifeboats to time periods to deepen pupils’ sense of change, continuity and chronology; sequencing and then selecting images for a Museum…
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Grace Darling – KQ6 – How should we remember Grace Darling?
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…
Read MoreWritten by Neil Thompson
All content on Keystage history is written and quality assured by Neil Thompson, a former history teacher, county history adviser and Ofsted inspector with more than 30 years’ experience in history education.