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Case Study: Working with gifted and talented children at an Iron Age hill fort in north Somerset
Primary History 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Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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...
Case Study: Working with gifted and talented children at an Iron Age hill fort in north Somerset
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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Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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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The true end of archaeology?
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Wow! The most magical words you can hear from a child. How do we get this wow factor? In my experience, archaeology is full of wow. It was Sir Mortimer Wheeler in 1954 who wrote...
The true end of archaeology?
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Enriching young children's understanding of time
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
As a primary teacher in the United States, I was sometimes caught off guard by students' ideas about time. Some 10-year-olds, I noticed, still could not read a clock or calculate the time between recess and...
Enriching young children's understanding of time
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A living timeline
Primary History case study
The problem
Pupils' background knowledge - Tudors and Victorians
Here at Knebworth House, primary school children visit us to enhance their learning of both the Tudors and the Victorians, in particular; both are popular periods to study within the primary curriculum and both have special significance for us at Knebworth....
A living timeline
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From Champion to Hero: Engaging Pupils in a study of significant Olympians
Primary History 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...
From Champion to Hero: Engaging Pupils in a study of significant Olympians
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Citizenship and the Olympics
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Citizenship links. While most of us engage with the nature of the sporting aspects of an Olympics throughout its modern day reincarnation, there are many aspects of the Games on and off the sporting field that...
Citizenship and the Olympics
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Recorded webinar series: The Olympic Games
Culture and political impact across the twentieth century
A series of free talks
2024 is an Olympic Games year. Held every four years (with the exception of during the World Wars and Covid-19 restrictions), the modern Olympics is the largest international sporting event in the world. However, historically it has not always been just the sports that are played...
Recorded webinar series: The Olympic Games
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Young Quills reviews 2024
The Young Quills Awards for best historical fiction for young people
The Young Quills books for each year must be published for the first time in English in the year preceding the competition – so 2023 for this year’s selection. Divided by age suitability the books are given to schools on the condition that the children and young people there write...
Young Quills reviews 2024
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Lesson Planning Recipe
Primary History article
Learning objectives
What questions should the children be able to answer at the end of your teaching of the topic? Pare this down to 6 key questions, one for each lesson of a 6-week term. What sub-questions will the lesson address and open up for the next step in the...
Lesson Planning Recipe
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From Kings To Queens to Sources and Evidence
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Until the mid 1930s the vast majority of children attended elementary schools, which went through from five to fourteen. In theory pre-war schools were left relatively free to teach in the way they chose as there...
From Kings To Queens to Sources and Evidence
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Young Quills reviews 2023
The Young Quills Awards for best historical fiction for young people
The Young Quills books for each year must be published for the first time in English in the year preceding the competition – so 2022 for this year’s selection. Divided by age suitability the books are given to schools on the condition that the children and young people there write...
Young Quills reviews 2023
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Difficult and challenging reading: Genre, text and multi-modal sources
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
What impact did the Saxon invaders have? Our Year 4 class were puzzling over the picture of the Roman town forum at the height of the Roman Empire, one A3 picture per pair of pupils.
To...
Difficult and challenging reading: Genre, text and multi-modal sources
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Victorian Britain: short lessons and exemplars
Multipage Article
Please note: these resources pre-date the current National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
A series of lessons, exemplars and guides to help you teach your students about Victorian Britain.
Victorian Britain: short lessons and exemplars
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Saltaire: Planning for an effective learning experience on a living site
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
In the autumn of 2009 I agreed to contribute to a project looking at how Saltaire village, Bradford could be developed as an educational site. This is a very popular site visited by many local schools,...
Saltaire: Planning for an effective learning experience on a living site
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Storytelling
E-CPD
N.B. This unit was produced before the new curriculum and therefore while much of the advice is still useful, there may be some out of date references or links.
Why story telling is important in primary history
Story is the most wonderful way of engaging children with history. At the...
Storytelling
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Artefacts and art facts: images of Sir Francis Drake
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated.
Editorial note: This article reveals the power of the Internet in helping us all, adults and children, to bring portraits like Drake's to life. So, as you read, follow the links.
Artefacts and art facts: images of Sir Francis Drake
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Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings
Primary Lesson Plans
Please note: these resources were produced as part of the Nuffield Primary History project (1991-2009) and pre-date the 2014 National Curriculum.
A series of lessons, exemplars and guides to help you teach your students about the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings.
Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings
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Beliefs in Ancient Egypt: Scheme of Work
Scheme of Work, Key Stage 2 History (unresourced)
This unit on Ancient Egypt offers pupils the chance to look at another civilisation very different from their own.
Students can be introduced to the key features of Ancient Egyptian civilisation through the beliefs and attitudes of these ancient people. Students should examine the similarities and differences between their ancient...
Beliefs in Ancient Egypt: Scheme of Work
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Education for geographical understanding
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
Geography is one of humanity's big ideas. It literally means something like ‘writing the world'. Thus, traditionally, geography is associated with rich descriptions of places. For many years geographers were almost synonymous with explorers, bringing back...
Education for geographical understanding
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Building learning places
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.
The built environment is hugely important to all of us, allowing us to live our lives in particular ways, and perhaps even constraining our lives in ways we don't yet recognise or understand. The buildings...
Building learning places
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Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War
Article
Two-and-a-half million men from undivided India served the British during the Second World War. Their experiences are little remembered today, neither in the West where a Euro/US-centric memory of the war dominates, nor in South Asia, which privileges nationalist histories of independence from the British Empire. What was it like...
Recorded Webinar: India and the Second World War
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Archaeology and the Early Years: The Noah's Ark Experience
Primary History 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...
Archaeology and the Early Years: The Noah's Ark Experience
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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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Archaeology: A view from the classroom
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.
Perhaps it is the earthiness of the ground beneath our feet which arouses pupils' curiosity. Or maybe, the idea of the unexpected with the hope of finding something precious or unusual, that is so engaging about archaeology....
Archaeology: A view from the classroom
