Using Sources

It is important to use a wide range of sources such as pictures, artefacts, music and sights. Children will use these to build up their enquiry thought and processes and to build up their understanding of past.

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  • Hearts, Hamsters and Historic Education

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. This is a reflection on a project, set up with a variety of different thoughts about education in its widest sense. Or, to put it another way, a primary school teacher's record of a unique...

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  • Cross Curricular Project on a famous person

    Article

    Please note: This article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. If you are considering studying someone other than Florence Nightingale you have two basic options. You can either choose a local character who would be more relevant to the children, or you could study someone who...

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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    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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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  • Archaeology and the Early Years: The Noah's Ark Experience

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. The authors of this article first worked together on a number of small scale excavations while Bev was still a primary school teacher in the Bradford area. When Bev changed roles to train...

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  • Case Study: Working with gifted and talented children at an Iron Age hill fort in north Somerset

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. The phone call was over - manna from heaven. The opportunity to work with a ‘real' archaeologist on a ‘real' Iron Age site seemed far too good to be true. The cluster of eight South...

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  • Case Study: Classroom archaeology. Sutton Hoo, or the mystery of the empty grave

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. ‘Would you like to go for a walk in the woods on the other side of the river? I asked my wife on a spring day in 1982. Happily she assented, and we drove off...

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  • Children's thinking in archaeology

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Young children enjoy prehistory Tactile, Physical and Enactive engagement with archaeological remains stimulates, excites and promotes children's logical, imaginative, creative and deductive thinking. Through archaeology there are infinite opportunities for ‘reasonable guesses' about sources and...

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  • Using feature films as a means of enhancing history teaching in the primary school

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Although I have always been fascinated by history and almost took it as my major subject at university, I have to admit that the bulk of my ‘knowledge' about historical people and events was shaped...

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  • In my view: Using Pictures

    Article

    Children grow up surrounded by pictures - moving pictures on the TV, still advertisements on hoardings, pictures in newspapers and magazines and comic books. ‘The media' are ever present, and so we assume that our children are visually literate - wise eyed. When we see them flicking through books ‘looking...

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  • History and Illustration: Quentin Blake

    Article

    When, at your invitation, I bring together the words ‘History' and ‘Illustration', two images spring immediately to mind. One is John Leech's illustrations to The Comic History of England (1847-1848); the other is the drawings that Ronald Searle brought back from being a prisoner of war of the Japanese a hundred...

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  • Think Bubble 49: Frozen moments

    Article

    Whenever I look at an old sepia photograph or one of those amazing 19th century genre pictures like William Powell Frith's Ramsgate Sands, it is not the immediate images that grab my attention. Although the detail is often remarkable, in the case of Ramsgate Sands the attentive mother gently introducing...

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  • Case Study: Investigating a picture in Key Stage 1

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. The teacher, Angela, brought from home a large coloured picture: in the middle a photograph of her grandfather in uniform, taken in 1917. The reading of the picture produced a flood of writing...

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  • A Beginner's Guide to using visual image in primary schools

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. The employment of the visual image is a fascinating and exciting way to enable children to gain a glimpse into the past. It is problematic, however, in that such imagery is often an...

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  • Teaching history through photographs in the internet and digital age

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. Images allow us to step back in time and ask important historical questions such as ‘Were the Victorians just like us?' Growing digitisation and the spread of the internet allow teachers and learners...

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  • Case Study: Children's questions about historical pictures

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. Pictures are an important source of evidence for children to use to find out about the past. They have an immediate impact and children of all ages and abilities find that they have...

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  • Visual Literacy: Learning through pictures and images

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated. What questions does the portrait raise in your mind? What messages does the artist intend to convey? How does the artist convey those messages to the intended audience? What might have been the circumstances under which the...

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  • British History Online - Digital Resources

    Article

    British History Online is the digital library containing some of the core printed primary and secondary sources for the medieval and modern history of the British Isles. Created by the Institute of Historical Research and the History of Parliament Trust, we aim to support academic and personal users around the...

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  • Census of Ireland, Dublin 1911 - National Archives of Ireland

    Article

    The household returns and ancillary records for the censuses of Ireland of 1901 and 1911, which are in the custody of the National Archives of Ireland, represent an extremely valuable part of the Irish national heritage. Click here to go to the site: National Archives of Ireland

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  • Turn your pupils into history dectectives: using sources to interpret old photographs

    Article

    Give your pupils an interesting old photograph and a magnifying glass and let them be history detectives investigating the past. Use local photographs of places they are familiar with and they will be instantly hooked. Add some more complex sources and give them an insight into the way that 'real'...

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  • Questions you have always wanted to ask about...Using photographs as sources of evidence

    Article

    Alan Hodkinson answers questions about using photographs as sources of evidence.

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