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, for a September 2014 start, taking into account the difficult areas of assessment and progression.
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.
This is the concluding lesson on the Victorians. It starts with a plate and a poster commemorating the achievements of Victorian Britain to set it in an international context. Pupils are then invited to weigh up the bad aspects of the reign before arriving...
This section accompanies the ones on teaching and learning approaches. It offers you a few ideas you may not have tried for a while, or at least not within the current topic. It is always a good idea to whet pupils' appetite for a...
This lesson gives the topic on the Vikings a really active start. Pupils are placed in role as Saxon spies who have to find out what makes the Vikings' boats so special. You'll love the technique known as reconstruction relay, because after the fast...
We thought we would offer you a range of different cameos showing how the history of the Olympics could be imaginatively integrated into your current teaching.
The teaching activities below have all be tried and tested in schools and have been judged outstanding by...
Using simple drama techniques to make a very old document come alive, this lesson involves pupils becoming the characters in the pictures of the Book of the Dead so that they can personalise what...
This fun activity is a brilliant way of developing pupils’ deductive thinking skills in a realistic context. Pupils are cast in the role of police detectives trying to solve a 3,000 year old crime, one with a difference. This...
A tightly structured series of activities on the reasons why the Mary Rose mysteriously sank which incorporates:
a. A history mystery using evidence discovered in the last few years
b. Evaluation of a website
c. Writing a better website explanation with a sense of...
OR 14 ways of telling this is a love letter
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...
Everyone knows that chronology is one of the key historical concepts pupils need to learn, and yet in very few schools is it given serious attention. Unless the subject leader makes a determined attempt to plan for the progressive development of chronological understanding across...
