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Printed pictures with text: Using cartoons as historical evidence
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Written and printed sources are often multi-modal in nature, i.e. they combine images and text (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001). Indeed, many printed sources in the print age, c. 1500-2000 and nearly all in the digital...
Printed pictures with text: Using cartoons as historical evidence
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Visual Literacy: Learning through pictures and images
Primary History 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Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.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...
Visual Literacy: Learning through pictures and images
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The view from the classroom
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
As teachers we are all responsible, with our pupils, for the environment within our classrooms. Together we create calm and order, challenge and activity. The environment beyond is of infinite variety.
The view from my...
The view from the classroom
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Case Study: Classroom archaeology. Sutton Hoo, or the mystery of the empty grave
Primary History 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Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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...
Case Study: Classroom archaeology. Sutton Hoo, or the mystery of the empty grave
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Case Study: Pictorial Recording
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.
The innovative use of visual images as communication mode and stimulus to writing is provided by Jan, a teacher on one of the Nuffield courses. Children, and adults, have trouble in making effective...
Case Study: Pictorial Recording
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History and Illustration: Quentin Blake
Primary History 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...
History and Illustration: Quentin Blake
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Questions you have always wanted to ask about... Accessing Archive Sources
Primary History article
Mary Mills answers questions about accessing archive sources.
Please note: this article dates from 2003 and some of the sources and services referenced may no longer be available.
Questions you have always wanted to ask about... Accessing Archive Sources
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Children's thinking in archaeology
Primary History 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...
Children's thinking in archaeology
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'I could change the world if I put my mind to it!' Teaching Controversial Issues and Citizenship Through a Project on heroes and heroines
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Rye Oak School is in its second year of ‘Fresh Start’ status and there are many issues in the school, including poorly motivated children and behavioural problems. Many of the children in the school were...
'I could change the world if I put my mind to it!' Teaching Controversial Issues and Citizenship Through a Project on heroes and heroines
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Teaching about racism, fairness and justice through key people
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Our school has no uniform. You can’t predict what most children or teachers will wear from one day to the next. So the children were rather surprised one day in July 1996 when most of...
Teaching about racism, fairness and justice through key people
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Using children's literature to look at bias and stereotyping
Primary History article
We have come to understand that modern children's literature often provides a way of examining a range of social and moral issues, affording educators the opportunity to discuss issues such as bias and stereotyping. Many adults have seen the possibilities here to contextualise classroom incidents differently, or to explore themes...
Using children's literature to look at bias and stereotyping
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Ways of making Key Stage 2 history culturally inclusive: A study of practice developed in Kirklees
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
Kirklees, West Yorkshire comprises Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Batley. There is a population of 300,000. Minority, ethnic pupils account for nearly 20%. Over the next decade it is predicted that there will be an increase in the number of pupils of Pakistani, Indian,...
Ways of making Key Stage 2 history culturally inclusive: A study of practice developed in Kirklees
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Written sources and local history at Key Stage 1
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Working on written sources is fundamental to historical learning. A document, inscription or sign brings children directly into contact with the past in much the same way as an artefact. It is real and conveys...
Written sources and local history at Key Stage 1
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Twist in the tales
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
Any academic who is in the business of writing will appreciate the pressure put on them by publishers desirous of a market product. Books for teachers need to be at once scholarly and popular, practicable and theoretical, readable but not reductionist. This...
Twist in the tales
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Folk tales: Universal values, individual differences
Paper
This paper is about using folktales to introduce young children to the past. It examines the ways in which folk tales reflect the different types of people found in the past and now, in all societies and how folk tales reflect universal values as well as differences between societies. It...
Folk tales: Universal values, individual differences
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Case Study: Children's questions about historical pictures
Primary History 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...
Case Study: Children's questions about historical pictures
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Case Study: Investigating a picture in Key Stage 1
Primary History 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...
Case Study: Investigating a picture in Key Stage 1
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Teaching history through photographs in the internet and digital age
Primary History 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...
Teaching history through photographs in the internet and digital age
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Think Bubble 49: Frozen moments
Primary History 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...
Think Bubble 49: Frozen moments
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In my view: Using Pictures
Primary History 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...
In my view: Using Pictures
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Getting Started: The identification of gifted historians
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The complexity of identification Crucial to personalised learning, entitlement and opportunity for equality is the identification of outstanding gifts and talents in children. The quest to identify gifted young historians is challenging as these pupils...
Getting Started: The identification of gifted historians
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Thinking through history: assessment and learning for the gifted young historian
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Historical enquiry requires reasoning. Even historical imagination depends on being able to evaluate a number of possible responses to an hypothesis and mastery of detail and argument. The high levels of thinking in history of...
Thinking through history: assessment and learning for the gifted young historian
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History, citizenship and controversy
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Y4 question their MP about nuclear waste policy; Y6 survey people in their community and school about a proposed casino in their town, and feed back the information to the local council; children decide to...
History, citizenship and controversy
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Engaging with controversial issues through drama
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The idea of children actively participating in their own education continues to be central to drama education. This same idea is also fundamental to the underlying ethos of citizenship education.There is a side to drama...
Engaging with controversial issues through drama
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Thinking through history: Story and developing children's minds
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.
Story is the crucial factor in children’s awareness of past times in their ‘mythic’ phase of mental development, see page 4. Everyone loves a story, stories ‘open out fresh fields, the illimitable beckoning of horizons to imagination…...
Thinking through history: Story and developing children's minds
