Tarquinius Superbus - The disastrous final king of Rome

This lesson is designed to be a succinct and clear lesson that provides enough detail for the Ancient History OCR 9-1 GCSE Foundations of Rome Unit. Including the exam question at the AfL questions - this lesson would ideally run over two hours.

It goes through how Tarquinius Superbus became king and why, what Livy says about him in his History of Rome, and his various disastrous political tyranny and cronyism.

There is also a clear and detailed explanation of Tarquin’s exile and his family tree - complicated issues but made as simple as possible here and easy for all students to access.

The lesson is punctuated by pertinent questions which students can either verbally respond to or write out short explanations. these help to embed the knowledge and I’ve found them pretty useful for AfL.

My students liked these kind of lessons because they’re completely dual coded and as a result it massively reduces cognitive load, allowing pupils to easily access what is otherwise quite complex information.

The lesson contains various useful embedded video clips (hence the larger file size) - a short entertaining video clip detailing the extent to which we can trust Livy as a source and one summarising Tarquin’s reign. There is also a 10 mark OCR exam question at the end with a variety of model answers which students can analyse before attempting their own with the help of sentence starters.