Unit plan for an Ancient Greeks topic, in which we challenged pupils to create their own museum exhibit based on Ancient Greeks. This was a big undertaking, but we pulled it off and the children in all classes were incredibly motivated and engaged. They worked tirelessly to create resources for the opening of the museum exhibit - parents and staff were very proud of the end results!

This is a revised History topic plan for the Tudors - Key skills match those taken from the New curriculum as of 2013. I’ve not included any resources because none are my own - all taken from searching TES and finding bits and pieces to match!

This is the plan - with extra cast sheet, resources list and invites - for a Roman Castleford assembly. It lasted about 15 minutes, and the kids absolutely loved it. The bits about castleford could easily be adapted so that you keep the rest about Roman britain and change it to suit your local area.

My class were working through a unit based on our school community and Britain overall. I was becoming very concerned that in the political climate of Brexit, some of the students were beginning to repeat misinformed, ignorant and even bigoted opinions that they had picked up elsewhere… so I wanted them to consider immigration over time from the view of an outside observer. This worked a treat and I was especially careful to let students lead discussion, with me guiding/asking questions as needed. The information is something I’ve adapted from BBC timelines. If you have access to computers, students could do this as a research task instead. My class completed this teamwork task based on immigration to Britain over time and the attitudes that people were met with when they arrived. The opening starters really encouraged discussion and allowed us together to respond to negative ideas about immigrants. Then, students worked in groups of 4 and read each page as a group, breaking down who was coming to Britain, why and if the reaction was positive or negative. They presented this in different ways - it was quite open ended. One group presented this on a scale of a great reaction (Notting Hill carnival) to terrible (race riots) - depending on the class, you could explicitly ask for this as the open-ended nature might be too tricky for LA/SEND students. It’s also possible to differentiate if you have a weaker group by taking out some of the sheets as this is a lot of ground to cover for some. At the end, we talked about why the British reacted this way and linked this to our starter. All in all, this prompted some really interesting discuss and allowed some students to break down misconceptions of other students too. I used this with year 7 but I think this would with KS2 right up to KS5 classes if adapted slightly.

Just a handy help sheet, showing 6 different women ‘who made History.’ I’ve used this as part of a discussion on ‘International Women’s Day,’ prompting students to think about: how these women faced adversity/were ahead of their time in some way what character traits and qualities they showed what it was that gave them the strength to be courageous, despite being afraid how we can use their message to find strength and courage in our daily lives.