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Teaching Mary Seacole to Key Stage 1
Mary Seacole's inclusion might be regarded by some as tokenism. That would be unfair. The site also features work on Rosa Parks and others. The reason Mary is included is mainly because it helps children...Mary Seacole – How should we remember her?
This lesson is the second featuring Mary Seacole. In the first her role was compared with Florence Nightingale's. The focus now shifts to asking two key questions: which was Mary Seacole's greatest achievement ; why...
Mary Seacole – KQ3 – What was Mary’s greatest achievement and how do we know?
The focus here is mainly on the evidence for Mary’s achievement. This is important as she was a more-or-less forgotten figure for 200 years. So how do we know that claims about Mary’s life are...
Mary Seacole – KQ4 – How did life change for Mary after the Crimean war?
Pupils create a fortunes graph showing the highs and lows of Mary’s life after the Crimea, identify a key turning point in her fortunes, and then consider ways in which Mary was helped when she...
New evidence of Anglo-Saxon mutilations as punishment
Ninth-century England was a bad place to be a criminal, new findings suggest. The skull of an Anglo-Saxon teenager discovered in Hampshire shows that she had her nose and upper lip cut off and may have...
New evidence at Chedworth Roman villa casts new light on Dark Ages
A mosaic at Chedworth Roman villa that was previously believed to date from the fourth century has now been radiocarbon-dated to 100 years later, around 480AD. This suggests, of course, that a sophisticated Roman lifestyle...
March 2020 inspection
The history curriculum is currently being reviewed. You and your subject leader know that current planning in history does not emphasise with enough precision what the school intends pupils to know, remember and be able...
Great new assessment task on women in Ancient Greece now live
Great new assessment task on women in Ancient Greece now live. It targets characteristic features and interpretations and comes along with a detailed mark scheme showing how pupils’ answers align with national...Evaluating websites in history at KS3-5: 3 pieces of top advice
Students are too trusting of what they read on the Internet. Most striking, they implicitly trust Google to verify sources for them--whatever Google lists first must be a good source. As we know, many are...
KQ1 – Why do we think Florence Nightingale is remembered?
Pupils make deductions from a range of visual clues to see if they can work out what job Florence Nightingale did, before being told the story of her life through an illustrated PowerPoint presentation. Selected...
The Blitz 80 years on
On the night of 14 November 1940, 80 years ago, one of the most infamous aerial attacks of all time occurred when a Luftwaffe air raid devastated the city of Coventry. The operation, called 'Moonlight Sonata'...
Beyond Face Value KQ4 Why did Ford Madox Brown paint this detailed picture of a scene that never existed?
This lesson revolves around a single painting entitled Work, painted by Ford Madox Brown between 1852 and 1865. Using Fastest Finger First pupils are encouraged to explore the full detail of this fascinating painting before...
Ten things your KS2 pupils should know about language and communication in the ancient world.
This article should inform your teaching of the Ancient Civilizations topic Imagine a world without writing-without any writing at all: no literature; no news stories; no history even. No tax returns! Well that was the world...
What can you do at KS3 to make your history curriculum more representative?
In a recent article for the Historical Association ( HA news- Autumn 2020) Jake Subryan Richards offers his advice: " For teachers it is at KS3 where there is most flexibility. Stress the interconnections between Britain...
12 things you need to know about the Mayan civilization before you teach it at KS2
1.In the year 1000 settlements like Chichen Itza were among the largest settlements anywhere in the world. Tikal was thought to have a population as large as 60,000. 2. Chichen Itza is probably the best preserved...Full sample recent primary history report January 2020
Pupils in your school thoroughly enjoy learning history. They like the enquiry-based approach you take to learning in the history curriculum, as they learn to ask and answer questions about history. Several spoke about the...Beyond Face Value KQ6: Photographer Fred’s clever way of beating the censors
In this fascinating lesson pupils learn how photographers avoided the censors they saw in KQ5 and how the government used certain images of the Blitz as propaganda, even though they didn’t happen as they...Plotting your pupils journey in history learning across the school
Just came across this visual depiction of the history curriculum at Springfield School in Hackney and thought I'd bring it to your attention. It has the great advantage of being able to see the sequence of...
Terror of the Tramp: Why did vagrancy become such an important issue in Elizabethan England?
GCSE lesson in which students work through a range of differentiated clues to work out 8 reasons which help answer the lessons’ enquiry question before evaluating how well a recent textbook explains it. So often I...
How close to World War Three has the world come since 1945. A Year 9 enquiry.
Just as the United Nations is marking its 75th anniversary, so the world peace it was set up to maintain is yet again under threat. The United States and China are at loggerheads over a...OFSTED’s view of deep dives in history
Recently Matthew Purves , the Deputy Director for Schools, set out OFSTED’s latest thinking on deep dives in primary schools. He makes reference a number of times to what that means in history. Here are...Report on leadership of primary history 2020
One of the key features underpinning the high quality of history learning was that history has a high status throughout the school, recognised by the headteacher. The subject leader attended local network meetings and time was made available for feedback...Analysis of OFSTED reports November 2019- February 2020, with my commentary
Analysis of OFSTED reports November 2019-February 2020, with my commentary By trawling through the most recent pre-Covid reports from November 2019 until February 2020, I have started to form a picture of the most commented on...Meeting OFSTED’s criteria for a good history curriculum at KS1 and 2 during extended transition period
Now that schools have an extra year’s grace from OFSTED to refine their curriculum that is being worked on, it is worth reminding ourselves of the key indicators that inspectors will be exploring.broadening the...
Deep dive issues: progression and assessment in primary history
One of the features of deep dive subject inspections is that the two hardest areas of a primary history leader’s role are in danger of being painfully exposed. One is the thorny issue of progression. How do...
