These are short tasks for history lessons designed to promote thinking skills. Although they might look like starters and plenaries, and indeed some are, most are designed to be used more flexibly at different stages of the lesson. They give you a ready-made activity which you can slot into your own teaching style. It may be an animated PowerPoint presentation, a puzzling image, a set of perplexing statistics or maybe a piece of text to analyse. What they all have in common is that they have worked and have both engaged pupils’ attention and have stimulated further learning. They do not attempt to provide a full lesson plan but they do have clear learning objectives and should fire your imagination to think of creative ways of using or developing them.
Pupils are given a copy of a letter from Henry to Anne Boleyn. It appears, at first glance to be impossibly hard to read -...
This is a well-covered topic and most of you will already have your own favoured approach. For that reason I am not offering just one lesson but instead a series of shorter smart tasks,...
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...
One of the great challenges of teaching KS1 history is to avoid the pitfall of turning history into just stories from the past. Of course we... 
This simple task encourages children to spot the differences between Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole.
With a large A4 image of Florence on one side, and Mary Seacole on...
A fun thinking skills activity in which pupils infer from visual clues before moving on to analyse a range of influence cards and evaluate a video before coming up with their own explanation.
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,...
This activity puts pupils in the role as researchers for a new book on Victorian schools. They have been commissioned to write a book for key Stage 1 pupils. Therefore, it needs to be...
This short activity works best as a...
An object-based problem-solving approach to learning about life during the Great Fire
This Smart Task is just part of a lesson and uses the power of concealed objects to fire children’s curiosity. Pupils work...
