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.
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 carefully about what sort of evidence MIGHT have survived. Showing...
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 want our youngest children to enjoy and remember the stories,... 
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.
As the pupils enter the room they are told that...
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...
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 short and interesting but also accurate. They must show evidence...
This short activity works best as a starter or plenary and is particularly effective in encouraging able...
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 to help archaeologists establish the likely owner of the mystery...
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...
This activity forms the central spine of a lesson on the reasons for setting up the Metropolitan Police Force in 1829. Students work in pairs to come up with a satisfying explanation. Rather than use the textbook directly, they are given a set of...
