Welcome to the Key Stage 2 section of Keystage history where you will find masses of advice on how to make history both fun and satisfyingly challenging. You will be helped to design and plan an exciting primary history curriculum linked to the NC 2014 Orders and taking into account the difficult areas of assessment and progression and mindful of the new focus on curriculum within OFSTED’s 2019 Framework. This is a tricky process at Key Stage 2. It is easy to lose continuity if you are not careful. You will be shown which skills and concepts are best developed in which contexts along with examples of key questions that have proved most effective in deepening learning. You also will be helped to make the most of history’s contribution to the whole curriculum by being shown cutting edge practice in the areas of cross-curricular history planning, literacy, thinking skills and creativity.
The site also offers a unique set of detailed lesson plans and resources for about 150 lessons which have been judged as outstanding by OFSTED. These cover all the major topics linked to an outstanding medium-term planner which expertly hows how to combine the most significant content with the development of conceptual understanding.
You will see below that these resources are constantly being added to , thereby ensuring that you have not only the latest and best advise but also the highest quality learning materials for your pupils.
As you know, the requirement to study Life in Tudor Britain was mysteriously and inexplicably removed from the Key Stage 2 curriculum in 2014. As one of the best-taught and popular of all the history topics that pupils study at junior school, the Tudors should...
This KS2 history enquiry revolves around Henry VIII’s divorce and the break with Rome, one of the best-known stories in English history. At first, Henry, this larger than life figure, seems almost to be a perfect guest on Jerry Springer. He married his...
The context of this lesson was to explore the highs and lows of Catherine of Aragon as a lead up to the Break with Rome. Pupils had already looked at the personality of Henry through his portraits. They had noticed, using the 'Police line-up'...
Pupils are given a copy of a letter from Henry to Anne Boleyn. It appears, at first glance to be impossibly hard to read - so many old-fashioned words, such an old-fashioned way of writing,...
This lesson features the lives of 4 different Tudor people as evidenced from a key document that they each have in common, namely an inventory. By studying the nature, value and amount of possessions each person had, pupils can start to draw conclusions about...
This enquiry focuses on helping children to learn about the power and authority of Queen Elizabeth and to appreciate the contrasting lifestyles of rich and poor in late Tudor England. The vehicle for doing this is to cast pupils in role as the household...
This lesson works really well because the tension you build into the waiting room activity gets all the class involved and focused. The more able pupils have a specific, more challenging role to play, working out an explanation that assuages the rage of an...
NB This is an additional lesson that does not appear on the planner.
This topic couldn’t be more relevant to today. We frequently hear it said that the poor are always with us: so are the problems of... 
This KS2 smart task places pupils in the role of detectives trying to prove that the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur may actually have been been a fact. First they have to think carefully about what sort of evidence MIGHT have survived. Showing...
