Landing now, August 2019, is a brilliant KS2 medium term planner rated outstanding by OFSTED. You will find 6 enquiry-led key questions each exploring a separate historical concept in depth, and a home-study. All the existing outstanding lessons and smart tasks have now been tied into this planning with some new lessons just added ( Sept 2019). the principal one of these relates to the Elizabethan theatre . It features 5 great differentiation strategies. Having already explored diversity of society under Henry VIII looking at homes and inventories, this enquiry builds on that understanding of diversity within a different context.
Among the main activities are: gallery, prove it! and market place. The first provides pupils with a series of images of Elizabethan theatre which are different in many ways but have a number of key similarities. Pupils have to work out what these are and then provide an annotated sketch for a film-set designer. Prove it, takes a number of textbook statements about Tudor theatres and then asks pupils to work out which evidence the historian used to make the statement. To do this they use a portfolio of visual sources, all carefully differentiated. Finally market place which turns the hall into the area surrounding an Elizabethan theatre. The pupils are given a role card describing their circumstances on the day of the play. The pupils’ job is to talk to as many other pupils in role as either rich, poor, or yeoman to find out the principal differences between the experiences of people living at different levels of society.
All are highly active strategies which really get the pupils thinking and lead to a creative discursive piece of writing. As with all new medium term plans we are producing there is also an assessment task with markscheme.
As the Tudors are not a unit in their own right, we can still continue to teach them in one of three ways:
1. We can make it the main focus for the thematic study: e.g. looking at how the role of the monarch has changed from Tudor times to today. The focus in 80% on Henry VIII and Elizabeth focusing on their portraits and what they tell us about them as rulers. The rest looks at how the monarchy is presented in the media today. Alternatively you might look at ‘voyages of exploration’ focusing heavily on the Tudors.
2. We can exploit any strong local links you might have e.g. schools within visiting distance of a Tudor palace
3. We can still teach it outside the National Curriculum. This need not mean extra time for history. We simply shave off time from the other units to make space for a truncated Tudor unit.
Whatever you decide, all existing outstanding lessons provide superb opportunities for excellent learning .
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