The Tudors lesson plans and resources

This comprehensive 5-week unit of study focuses on the Tudor monarchy’s reign of England. Each lesson follows the criteria set out by the UK National Curriculum. Students generate and ask questions, this forms a part of the opportunities for assessment that each lesson provides. PPT slideshows become animated to stimulate the students and work is respectfully challenging and target-achieving. All the resources required to teach these lessons are included in the download.

Each lesson plan states the UK National Curriculum learning objectives covered, the learning outcomes, skills being taught, and learning attributes that the students will take from each lesson (e.g. risk-taking, confidence, collaborators). Lesson plans also include teaching activity, key questions that the teacher should try to elicit from the students, key vocabulary that may need introducing to the students beforehand and criteria for assessing student attainment (can be adopted as either AfL or AoL depending on your policy towards assessing in Humanities/ History)

Lesson 1 (ppt, lesson plan, activity worksheet): Tudor Introduction.
Students are encouraged to think about what they know about history. They are shown how events can be illustrated on visual representations and this allows them to see how one event is often the starter for another event. At this point a class timeline can be displayed.
Students are introduced to the Tudor’s history with the story of the battle of Bosworth and are set an activity to visually log the key dates and events of the Tudor family.

Lesson 2 (ppt, lesson plan, wives portraits): Wives and family.
The second lesson begins with a reminder about the previous lesson. Students are encouraged to think about marriage and how Henry VIII is famous for his wives. An animated family tree is shown and the students are challenged to independently research a character from the studied timeline. Extension material is provided for this lesson.

Lesson 3 (ppt, lesson plan, Henry VIII profile, website list): Compare Henrys.
Starts with a review of the previous lesson and the students are reminded about Henry VII and Henry VIII. From there the students are required to research Henry VIII using a variety of resources and present their findings to the class. The plenary exercise explores the differences between some aspects that the students would have discovered. Finally a link is provided to a well-known television rendition of Henry VIII’s life.

Lesson 4 (ppt, lesson plan, Mary facts): Queen Mary I.
From the previous lesson ‘refresher’ the students are reminded about the Tudor timeline and family tree and find the place of Mary I. Students are encouraged to generate and record questions as part of this fun, student-led lesson’s activity.

Lesson 5 (ppt, lesson plan): Tudor Exploration.
Review of previous lesson.