Year 5/6 topic A lesson presentation and accompanying resource that shares examples of the exploits of the Ancient Maya and allows children to discover their uses to them at the time but also begin to make connections with our lives today. Children will complete an ordering activity whereby they decide on a hierarchy of importance for the inventions and subsequently justify their choices referring the explanations used within the lesson presentation and their own opinions.

This is a lesson for early on in a World War 2 unit of work or to provide children with some contextual knowledge for the period surrounding World War 2. It contains a presentation giving key information and events that preceded the war with explanations as to their importance. Differentiation is involved in the recapping of events and the ordering of the timeline, furthermore a detailed paragraph considering the significance of the events is offered. Also included are the planning for the lesson and the resources for the timelines.

Part of the War Horse - Historical Story Writing Unit of work (3 weeks). https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/historical-stories-war-horse-war-game-and-one-boy-s-war-12205177 This lesson is a cross curricular lesson that incorporates historical inquiry to tie in with a later English lesson. Children have been reading War Horse in class and are now going to use what they have been exposed to in the story to study the importance of historical accuracy when writing about a specified time period. The lesson looks into the term anachronism in order to then allow children to research factual information, the daily life of those in World War 1 and their hobbies and roles in society with the aim of identifying features that they can include in their own writing for contextually accurate pieces. Attached is the presentation for the lesson, the lesson plan and some research for children to use if they do not have access to books on the time period of internet access.

Year 6 - Lesson presentation, activity sheet and lesson plan focusing on the experiences of those who remained in cities whilst others were evacuated. Culminating in a descriptive, emotive piece of writing in the first person as air raid sirens are sounding and the movements between the home and the air shelters. Activity sheet contains helpful prompt questions and success criteria for piece of writing.

This is the full 15 lesson, unit of work for historical writing. One of the free lessons from this unit is found here: https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/war-horse-anachronims-and-historical-research-lesson-12202278 The unit contains a focus on the study and use of historical stories through World War One as a cross curricular approach to teaching English with History and Drama. We use War Horse as inspiration for work to developing characters, identifying different sentence types whilst becoming familiar with vocabulary from the time period through research based lessons. The aim of these lessons is to compare the book with other adaptations of War Horse before attempting to write their own screenplay of a scene, adapted for their purpose with appropriate dialogue for their chosen scene. War Game and One Boy’s War are included to add further insight from a soldier’s perspective with a focus on creating an understanding of the realism of war and for children to appreciate the horrors, squalid conditions and misleading nature of the war that they joined (some rather enthusiastically). Children shall use research skills to discover the true nature of the trenches that soldiers fought in and create a letter home as a soldier to a friend who may be considering enlisting. In this letter they shall have to decide whether they would encourage or discourage their friend from enlisting. Finally, the audience and purpose for their writing shall change from informal to formal, where they write a historically accurate piece for an exhibition. All necessary resources are included as well as additional tasks based around War Horse for children to complete as homework if they have access to the book at home.