Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. The class had composed its Anglo-Saxon funeral poem for Raedwald, an Anglo-Saxon king, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A6dwald_of_East_Anglia, the high king or Bretwalda of all seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the early seventh century as well as being King...

IntroductionIn this short paper you will discover some of the tools for ‘doing' local history. They are based on where I live: you can get similar types of sources from where you live, work or teach. Your main source will be a local library or record office, but there is...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. If you have heard the excited buzz of voices as a class of children enters a museum you will be aware of their potential as inspiring learning spaces. Teaching in a museum context we see this...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. To help children develop a more rounded awareness of historical understanding, they should have the opportunity to examine different types of evidence. The National Curriculum states that, "children should recognise that the past is represented and interpreted...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Editorial note: John Fines produced two case studies of Local History for the Nuffield Primary History Project. One on them is published here for the first time.

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. A study of the local environment can make a vital contribution to children's sense of identity, their sense of place and the community in which they live. More importantly, a local study can enable children...

Please note: This article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. Why teach children about architecture and the built environment? Because they shape the future and because they already change our architecture and define the public realm everyday through their actions. Learning about architecture and the built...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...