So you think your pupils know about Witchcraft in early modern Britain.

1. Were witches burned in English-speaking countries? A. No, they were hanged not burned, because witchcraft was a felony. This was also true in North America. 2. Were millions of witches put to death? A. No, the real number was nearer 50,000 across the whole era and whole...

What can we tell about the Ancient Greeks from a study of their Olympics? KQ5 part 1

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...

Teaching the British Empire KS3

In a recent article for the Telegraph, journalist and writer Jeremy Paxman made the following case for teaching the history of the British Empire:

[It] explains so much about who we are now… Imperial history explains both why Britain has a seat on the UN Security...

How far did life really change when William the Conqueror became king after the Battle of Hastings? SMART TASK KS3

Pupils have to design a set of stamps to show the 5 biggest changes introduced by William the Conqueror after Hastings, but first they need to place ideas on a spectrum ranging from massive change, through little change to continuity. Starter In small groups of three pupils...

How well do these cartoons cover the causes of World War One?

In pairs, Y9/GCSE students visit 9 different cartoons posted around the wall. They have to work out: a. Which cause is being ‘covered’ in each cartoon - sometimes two. b. Which causes are NOT covered. They are given a textbook diagram explaining the causes in the form of an...

Court of King Cholera: Where am I in the picture?

This activity works in two ways; it activates pupils’ prior knowledge in a fun way and raises questions about conditions at the time the chosen image, A Court for King Cholera was produced, i.e. September 1852. Students work in pairs. They are each given a copy...

Puzzle corner 3: the strange case of the missing slave

Pupils will find that this example of a black slave, painted out of an eighteenth century painting of a tobacco lord’s family, makes an intriguing starter to any lesson on the slave trade. They will enjoy ‘finding’ him in the portrait, thanks to 21st century...

Why were so many witches hanged in the 16th and 17th centuries?

Can we beat the textbook explanation?

The inspiration for this lesson came from the talented history department at Court Moor school and in particular the outstanding history subject leader Claire Conley-Harper. Originally it was a short thinking skills activity on raising historical questions which then grew...

How ‘Bloody’ was Mary Tudor?

At the heart of the lesson is a courtroom trial. Pupils have to acquit Mary Tudor of the charge of being 'Bloody'. They look together at the reasons why she was thought to be 'bloody' and then work in groups to analyse the evidence in...

Why did sons kill fathers in the English Civil War? The Verneys enquiry

Pupils in this Year 8 class had already looked at background causes of the English Civil War and had a clear grasp of the narrative of events 1625-42. They had looked at the different ways in which historians had tried to explain the causes, so...

Parchment in the flames – the World Turned Upside Down

This lesson uses a familiar post-Civil War source in an unusually intelligent way to give Y8 pupils a good understanding of the need to interpret sources in their historical context. The featured pamphlet has been variously attributed and captioned with dates as far apart as...

Did the Great Fire really end the Great Plague of 1665?

In this one-lesson enquiry pupils look carefully at statistics and maps in order to challenge received opinion. To do so they must raise as well as answer questions and need to be mindful of flaws in the evidence they use. They conclude by reaching an...

Why did Peasant unrest boil over into revolt in 1381?

Reasons for the Peasants' Revolt

This lesson uses the analogy of raising the political temperature, and then boiling over, to explain the Peasants' Revolt. Pupils construct their own living graphs to build up their own temperature charts. Why, if life was so harsh for medieval peasants...

Starter activity on religious changes in the reign of Edward VI. SMART TASK KS3

A quick small group starter task in which pupils collaborate to show what meaning they can make from an image taken from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. They use the PowerPoint jig-sawed slides to feedback, while you use the notes provided to take pupils from...

Teaching KS3 History: Medieval Britain

A wide range of lessons are showcased here because the medieval period is highly popular and has retained its statutory position in the KS3 2008 revisions. At the time of writing 2013 we are all hoping that the plans to give the Medieval period to...

How significant was Magna Carta? SMART TASK KS3

Pupils have been commissioned to produce two brief podcasts for the British Library website aimed at a teenage audience. The first podcast is to last 100 seconds and must explain why Magna Carta is significant. (You might want to look at the section on the...

The Empire strikes back! SMART TASK KS3

Having previously investigated the criticism of empire, students now set about defending it. After studying a contemporary Indian view of Empire, which they critique in terms of usefulness, students explore a range of possible achievements of the empire, some using a structured sheet, others are...

Smart Task Puzzle Corner – Why did so many infants die when the death rate was falling?

Puzzle corner: SMART thinking skills task on why so many infants continued to die before their first birthday at a time when the death rate was falling rapidly.

This short activity works best as a starter or plenary and is particularly effective in encouraging able...

Hitler’s propaganda: the cult of leader. Reading internal clues. KS3 & 4 Smart Task

The aim of this short task is to encourage students to look really closely at images for what is there, not what they think should be there. Students are asked to consider how they might expect Hitler to be portrayed on a propaganda poster. They are...

Why did Germany lose the Battle of Britain?

If Britain was only a few days away from defeat in August 1940 how on earth did she win the Battle of Britain a month later?

PLEASE NOTE - This lesson was aimed at Key Stage 3 but should be capable of being used with minimal...

Great starter on interpretations of Henry VIII

Working closely with academic authors, in this case Catherine Fletcher, always gives a fascinating insight into what historians want to write and publishers want to sell. This is fertile ground for exploring the question of interpretations with pupils at KS2 and KS3. With this simple...

How well do your pupils know Medieval Britain? A short diagnostic smart task called truth detector

Pupils are given 18 statement cards (provided as RS2) about the Middle Ages on Britain to place on the truth spectrum (provided as RS1), labelled ‘made up’ to ‘definitely true’, (which you will need to enlarge when you print to landscape). As they are deliberating...

Castle design. Would I lie to you? Fun smart task

This enjoyable session has serious intent: to question some careless assumptions about castle building that often creep into Y7 teaching about castles. The idea is that pupils start to seriously question just how quickly and dramatically things really did change. It works like this. 5 teams...

Was there really a Blitz spirit? Killer evidence. Smart Task

Historians to this day still argue as to whether there was a Blitz spirit or not. Much depends on the evidence they use. This ‘Killer evidence’ Smart Task enables you to discover which evidence the students think is most powerful for each side and which would...

Having lost his parliament, then his throne, why did Charles I have to lose his head?

This diamond-9 prioritising causes activity concludes pupils’ investigation of the reasons for the trial and execution of Charles I. Pupils are presented with 9 ideas which they have to rank so that the most important idea is at the top the to next important below, all...

Market place: Why I didn’t oppose Hitler.

To help pupils to understand why so few people opposed Hitler in the 1930s the use of this market place activity has proved to be really effective. Give every student a different role card and ask them to talk to every other member in the...

Cromwell a reputation deserved. KS3 Smart Task

This short task focuses on an entry from a website used by lots of people today, mainly in Ireland, to find out about Cromwell’s time there. Pupils are asked to assess whether it is a reliable interpretation of Cromwell’s behaviour in Ireland in the early 1650s....

Industrial Britain KS3 Smart Task on the changes brought about by industrialisation

This task helps pupils to develop an overview of the changes ushered in by industrialisation. The aim is to get pupils to generalise from the particular, identifying which groups of people benefited and which suffered. By dating the cards (there are 32 cards: 7 from...

Early Modern Britain 1500-1750 Smart Task: Editor’s Pencil

A quick overview activity in which pupils have to spot and correct 20 deliberate mistakes. Pupils are given an activity with a summary of the changes that took place in Britain between 1500 and 1750. Unfortunately, the person who wrote it is bad at history. Using their...

Which modern Olympic Games am I? Short KS3 Smart Task

This engaging smart task on the Olympics in the 20th century focuses pupils’ attention on significant individual games as a prelude to drawing out weightier themes. Worksheet and answers in resources section below. A full lesson on What do the Olympic Games tell us about...

Industrial Revolution KS3 Smart Task: The Mystery of the Blackburn Cemetery

Why not start your class investigation into life during the Industrial Revolution with a mystery? Based on a recent discovery of 800 child skeletons in a cemetery in Blackburn, pupils are challenged to work out why almost the graves were for children. What seems to have...

KS3 & 4 The Causes of World War One: The Blame Game

This smart task which can be used from Y9 or for GCSE can be used as a form of diagnostic assessment to see to what extent students can attribute blame for causing the First World War to as many as 6 countries. While the students...

Explaining why there were so many casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. SMART TASK

This task, suitable for KS3 Year 9 or KS4 students, presents them with something of a conundrum. When the Allies had far more men than the Germans and had fired millions of shells the previous week why was the first day of the Battle of...

Why are these accounts of the Battle of the Somme, written by the same person, so different? SMART TASK

This task, suitable for Y9 in KS3 or KS4, drives at the heart of source evaluation. Students explore two sources, authored by the same journalist, Philip Gibbs, but written 4 years apart. They are asked to spot, and then explain the difference in tone and...

Battalion 101. Why did they shoot? A history mystery

This lesson could be used as part of a Year 9 course or with the Germany module of Y10/11 SHP or Modern World. Students are confronted with moral issues and have to explain what prompted men to kill in the way they did- and the...

What can we learn about the Empire from a Christmas pudding?

This lesson starts with a simple fun activity, working competitively in teams to locate the source of ingredients for an Empire Christmas pudding using a world map to help. Pupils are then introduced to the changing nature of the empire in the inter-war years before...

What made runaway slaves successful?

This short enquiry enables pupils to come up with their own ideas about runaway slaves working from first hand evidence of adverts for the slaves ‘ arrest'. They work in pairs to come up with possible reasons why some slaves were caught and not others...

Free at Last? How far had the Civil Rights Movement come by 1963?

How far have Afro-Americans come in their struggle for equality over the last 160 years? With many schools operating a 2-year Key Stage 3 curriculum, it is important to offer a few quick overviews of topics you’d love to teach in greater depth, but simply...

Smart Tasks – Minted: Telling the story of changing British rulers by exploring 10 significant coins

If you are looking for an interesting way of offering pupils overviews or of looking at the concept of significance, then you might find the accompanying PowerPoint helpful. The theme is the changing nature of how we are ruled and is best tackled at the...

Dread of the lash: How harsh were punishments on slave plantations?

This enquiry-led lesson really does make pupils think as historians. Not only are they introduced to authentic slave punishment records, they also have to test and then raise hypotheses of their own. They have to consider whether individual slave owners were kinder than normal by...

Reasons for the abolition of the slave trade: poacher turned gamekeeper

Diagram showing the dynamic of causation

This lesson turns on a paradox. If the transatlantic slave trade was prospering in 1787, why was it abolished just 20 years later? This more challenging enquiry question forces pupils to go beyond listing and categorising causes to think about the dynamic of change. Which...

How should we film the Middle passage? How accurate are Roots and Amistad?

This varied lesson challenges pupils to use evidence constructively to create their own version of conditions on the Middle Passage. They do this as if advising a film director. In so doing, they have to critically evaluate both film excerpts and written sources. Mathematical skills...

What can we learn about the slave trade from just one poem?

This lesson uses a very simple source to help pupils to get a feel for some of the issues they will be investigating in the weeks ahead in their slavery enquiry. The point of using the poem is that it raises questions and makes assumptions...

Rosa Parks – the true story

This open-ended enquiry explores one of the most abiding stories of American Civil Rights. Students are invited to advise a film director on what actually happened in Montgomery in December 1955. They are introduced to the standard, simplified, textbook version that all young Americans are...

SMART TASK – How did a small country on the edge of North West Europe manage to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface and 400 million people?

This lesson asks an important question that the textbooks rarely cover and comes after students have looked at events in Africa and India in depth. Pupils are presented with an hypothesis that the reason why the British were able to maintain such a large empire...

Smart Tasks: End of Empire: Why did it all end so quickly?

This SMART task ask pupils to classify a number of different smaller reasons why The Empire declined and fell, under four bigger headings. But they are not told what these headings are. This they must work out for themselves. In searching for their own method...

Smart Task: Popping corks? What is the best analogy to explain the causes of the French Revolution

A smart task for Gifted and Talented pupils in Y9. Towards the end of your study of the causes of the French Revolution, why not ask your G&T pupils to consider the best analogy to explain the causes of the French Revolution. Is it popping of corks...

What should we write on Robespierre’s plaque?

In his home town of Arras, the plaque commemorating his achievements has been vandalised and replaced so often that it is clear that people still feel strongly about him. Can pupils create a plaque of their own using just 100 words which would give a...

Execution of Louis XVI

Enquiry question: When the French Revolution started in 1789, few wanted the death of the king or the end of monarchy. But just 4 years later the king’s head has been chopped off. Why? This lesson was taught to a mixed-ability class of 19 which contained...

Smart Task: Evacuation: was it worth it?

Many primary schools look in detail at evacuation in World War Two and you may not want to go over old ground again but there is nothing to stop you taking student’s understanding to a deeper level. In addition, to looking at contrasting interpretations and...

Outstanding Lessons at KS3

Can we beat the textbook explanation?

Reasons for the Peasants' Revolt

If Britain was only a few days away from defeat in August 1940 how on earth did she win the Battle of Britain a month later?