Classroom Resources

The HA has spent a great deal of effort in developing resonant support for the Key Stage 2 curriculum. Most you will find here, especially the articles and reviews from Primary History. Read more

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  • Extending Primary Children's thinking through artefacts

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. A research project was carried out with Maltese primary school children at San Andrea Infant and Middle school to see if learning strategies could accelerate pupils' cognitive development. The research involved a range of historical sources:...

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  • From Champion to Hero: Engaging Pupils in a study of significant Olympians

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Allocated the task of researching and presenting ideas for teaching about significant Olympians, I thought: ‘Brilliant, this is the easy one'. How wrong can one be! I expected to be able to access a plethora of...

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  • From Home to the Front: World War I

    Article

    Events which encapsulate family, community, national and global history provide rich opportunities for engaging children. Some of these draw on positive memories associated with past events: the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, how people responded to the first flight to the moon, the Millennium celebrations. Yet it is perhaps gruelling...

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  • Helping pupils to view historical film critically

    Article

    Introduction: The teaching potential of film Films about historical events seem like the nearest thing we can give our pupils to a time machine. In commercial film, the physical appearance of the past has often been carefully researched, thus a snippet from Gladiator, for example, can give pupils some idea of...

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  • History, ICT and the digital age

    Article

    Three things are important 1.Don't fall for the hype You are not a bad teacher if you are not using a lot of technology in history or any other area! Research evidence does not support many of the claims made about technology." Most of the evidence we have is anecdotal...

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  • History, artefacts and storytelling in the 2011 primary curriculum

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. This article will argue that although history can seem a ‘hard' discipline for young children, it can be made accessible and exciting through telling stories about objects. The article does not contain advice about obtaining objects:...

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  • Ideas for Assemblies: Lest we forget

    Article

    Over the next three editions of Primary History our assemblies pages will be linked to the theme of commemorating the First World War. We have found that while many teachers wish to remember these events in school, they are unsure how to approach the subject with primary aged children. It...

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  • Ideas for Assemblies: Refugee stories

    Article

    Please note: this piece was written before Sir Mo Farah’s 2022 disclosure that he was trafficked to the UK as a child, so some of its content is no longer accurate. An assembly could focus on the achievements of their lives, experiences as child refugees and migrants, and how they overcame...

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  • In My View: Creativity & History

    Article

    Introduction A great deal has been written recently defining what is meant by creativity in primary education. And much has been written urging us to ‘teach creatively'. Yet there had been no exploration of what teaching creatively means in terms of teaching history until a group of colleagues and I...

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  • Investigating the Indus Valley (2600-1900 B.C.)

    Article

    In 1924 The Illustrated London News broke the story of a sensational discovery in the Indian subcontinent. Ruined mounds at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, 600 km apart, were forgotten cities of a lost civilisation. Nearly all we know about the Indus Civilisation comes from archaeology. What survives leaves many unanswered questions,...

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  • Investigating the ancient Olympic games: A Case Study

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. In a 10-week unit on Ancient Greece, we gave the fourth lesson over to the ancient Olympic Games. The class was a delight: 32 enthusiastic Year 6 children in an urban county primary school. We knew...

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  • Learning to engage with documents through role play

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. First let me say that I did not research the materials used or plan this lesson. For this I must acknowledge, with thanks, that this is the work of my colleague, Mike Huggins, and the senior...

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  • Local railway history: using visual resources

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Before the 1960s British Rail's spider-web network of railway lines reached every town and thousands of villages. Where you live would have been within a thirty minute journey from a station; scroll down to look at...

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  • Ordinary Roman life

    Article

    How do we make connections with past lives through authentic artefacts? My research evidence suggests that pupils do not really like having to imagine they are an evacuee or a Roman (for example), but do like engaging with and thinking about the reality of past lives. It has been surprising...

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  • Our Iron Age challenge

    Article

    The University of Chichester’s three-year BA (Hons) Degree for Primary Education and Teaching involves learning how to provide rigorous and creative educational opportunities for children. The course involves one creativity module each year. The final one involves the development of skills and confidence in creating problem-solving. Four of us were...

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  • Overground, underground and across the sea

    Article

    Communication is at the heart of what it is to be human, and the British postal service has helped to shape the modern world as we know it today. From cryptic Victorian Valentine cards to a lion encountered on Salisbury Plain, there is nothing ordinary about the story of the post! The British postal service...

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  • Place-names and the National Curriculum for History

    Article

    Place-names, such as house or school names, are infinite in number and all around us. Every place-name may convey a message about the place. Often place-names record and celebrate local and national people, events and incidents, define what a place looked like in the past and how we used to...

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  • Planning for local history

    Article

    Editorial comment: Barbara writes from the viewpoint of a classroom teacher facing the challenge of ‘Doing local history' for the first time.

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  • Political literacy: citizenship through the English national curriculum's the Romans in Britain study unit

    Article

    Hilary Claire raised fundamental issues about the relationship between History and Citizenship for the development of a sense of identity. Her paper stresses the importance of sceptical thinking, perspective, sequence and progression - the essential chronology that underpins pupil's education for citizenship in the timeframe that history provides...

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  • Pride in place: What does historical geographical and social understanding look like?

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. ‘Some primary schools are like the High Street in many of our towns. I can predict what I will see before I go through the door. What I want to see is something that gives me...

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