This is a fully-resourced lesson for home learning suitable for KS3 RE and History. Simply download and send to your students - fully explains and guides through concepts slide by slide. Assumes no knowledge to start. Can either be used as part of a series on heroes or as a stand-alone lesson responding to the Cecil Rhodes statue decision. Self guiding, with pictures, questions to think about and then a menu of 6 tasks on the final slide aimed at different abilities. I have 15 years’ experience making lesson resources as Head of RE. You will download an editable powerpoint file as well as a PDF of the PPT - some students do not have Office software to be able to read it.

A lesson exploring the Salem Witch Trials as an example of what happens when people start to blame groups and hysteria controls the crowd.

As Humanities Faculty Leader I have always looked for ways to help the team to easily plan creative and collaborative learning. I have developed this idea over a few years and it has been well used in my department and around the school - at my school there aren’t enough classrooms and teachers are always in and out of each others’ rooms to teach lessons here and there. You can’t carry much with you and your lesson may suffer by not having all your usual resources to hand if you need to adapt the lesson. The concept here is that with the 10 inexpensive resources on the top row you can do the 99 lesson activities underneath. Once you’ve got your head around the different activities, you have effectively planned for spontaneity! Crucially, all ten resources can fit into a ‘toolbox’ no bigger than a shoebox which you can keep under your desk for those moments when the lesson is not going to plan. I observe a lot of trainee teachers and the number 1 thing I see that pulls a lesson down is the lack of interaction with what is happening in the classroom - with this concept teachers have 99 ideas up their sleeve to rescue a lesson with, rather than sticking to the lesson plan rigidly. If you were doing your training or NQT year at my school then this is one of the first techniques that our Teaching & Learning team will teach you. You would be given a box (by me!) and then challenged to use all 99 activities in 2 weeks. I think new teachers need ideas for lesson tasks and strategies for dealing with the unexpected, not volumes of theory! Its also something our cover supervisors have with them as they go from room to room trying to teach the best lesson they can with very little preparation. I’m not suggesting its a good idea not to prep a lesson, but the reality is that there will always be a time when you need to pull an activity out of your sleeve or ‘wing’ a lesson - this resource is for just those situations. You will get the file as a word document that will print to A3, but you can adjust the paper size in settings. It is an unlocked word document in case you decide you want to add or change it for your own use - the art of being a magpie is something else I encourage our new teachers with!

This is an excel file which contains a tab for each unit relevant for Paper 1 of the John Frye Hodder textbook. Each tab contains flashcard templates for each unit. The flashcards are arranged in order so that your students can use the flashcards as a revision resource - they work through the book, chapter by chapter, completing the back of the flashcards with notes. There are over 650 flashcard templates so enough to keep them going! It is arranged in tabs so that you can email the excel file to your repro dept and ask them to print a certain tab onto A4 card. The cells are set up so that you just need to quarter the sheets of A4 card. I give them to my 6th formers to do for homework, and they take them away, cut them up themselves and bring them back completed with notes. It is good for getting them reading independently and also to create a revision resource for exam time. There are 16 units in total for the Philosophy & Ethics paper so well worth starting revision as early as possible. The excel file will not be locked so you can add extra ones to it should you feel the 600-odd flashcards aren’t enough! It took me over an hour per unit to read the textbook chapter, consider what they need to know for the exam and make the flashcards. So that is 14 sets of flashcards taking over an hour each to produce! Truth be told, I would not have started making these had I realised precisely how much time would need to be invested in it! You can buy back days of your life by buying this, plus can be reused every year, so at £3 this represents a cost of 22pence per hour of your time saved.

A basic worksheet with texts from pre and post exile about the Messiah as part of a lesson on how Jewish concepts of the Messiah changed and why Jesus was not recognised as the Messiah.

Here is another one of my workbooks - I originally started making them in lockdown and realised that staff and students preferred this style of learning. They are fully self contained, so are suitable for home learning as well as classroom based lessons. Non specialists will find this style of teaching valuable as well as RE specialists - everything is in one place and the students can continue with the work at home, on holiday or in the absence of the teacher. I have over 15 years’ experience as Head of RE! What you have here is a series of lessons that I have honed and perfected overthe 20-odd years of my career so far, to include the right sort of challenge, to tick all the boxes, to meet the demands of your locally agreed syllabus, allow differentiation by outcome and expectation, that prepares students for GCSE level work and contributes to PSHE outcomes. There is a focus on scriptures and for those who want to get technical, I would describe my pedagogy as broadly critical realism, however I try to keep the lesson activities varied and make it to it a booklet that can be printed on A3 folded to an A4 booklet. O#sted have observed me teaching with one of these lessons and the inspector was complimentary. There are 6 lessons in each workbook I write, because I teach to an hour a week so each unit neatly fits a half term, with an assessment at the end of the unit. For the sum of £4 you can buy back a day of planning lessons - you will download a file that can be easily sent to your school reprographics department and/or adapted to fit your own school context.

Here is a very full PPT on how and why religion causes war for AQA GCSE Spec A or the Short Course. Has historical context in the Crusades, ‘Jihad’ including quotes from the Quran about war, extremism and makes a parallel with Joshua 6 (the story about Joshua defeating Jericho). Was the seige of Jericho a war crime by modern standards? It is hard reading for any believer today so how should stories like it be interpreted? By the end of the resource students should be ready to write a Q5 answer with well developed ideas. There is a template for this with basic ideas included and students develop the ideas to form their own answer. There are 2 or 3 hours of lesson time in this, or for a higher ability you might work through the PPT in the lesson and give them the Q5 task for HW. I’ve included a ‘memory sheet’ on Just War criteria since the next obvious lesson in the sequence is probably going to be how Just War fits with modern conflict.

Here is a lesson’s PPT & worksheets on Kosher. Pitched at high ability Y8, it can be scaled down by using only page 1 of the scripture worksheet. I also recycle this same lesson for Y9 with GCSE AQA Judaism practices.

A good exercise to get your students thinking about how they can pick up the marks from a Q4 answer in as few words as possible. They read through my very long-winded but 5/5 answer, crossing out the words that don’t help to get the marks.

This is a 56 page revision guide that I put together for my own students as a complete guide. We do the AQA short course with Christianity & Judaism. This is not all original work, but if you teach the SC to whole cohorts you will know how reluctant parents are to buy the official printed revision guides so I made my own that is comprehensive enough to benefit top set students but also the right size so that our reprographics department can print it as an A4 stapled booklet. I have 15 years of experience of being Head of RE and training students for different exam specifications over that time - I have tried to condense the most useful aspects of exam preparation into this guide - it is a complete guide including what the expect, how to revise, checklists and information on the subject content. This is the only revision guide I use with my students and we get decent results - comparative with English, Maths & Science. It took me days of my time to write this! There are other revision resources I have put on TES that will save time for you. The contents page shows what it includes: What the exam paper looks like – 3 What is development? - 4 Exam strategy - 5 Memory Cheat Sheet #1 – 6 Memory Cheat Sheet #2 - 7 How to revise for the exam (C.R.A.M.P.S.) - 8 Revision checklists Christianity checklist - 9 Judaism checklist - 10 Families and Relationships checklist - 11 Religion, Peace & Conflict checklist - 12 Religious groups within Christianity & Judaism - 13 Course content notes Christianity notes - 14 Judaism notes - 22 Families & Relationships notes - 31 War & Conflict notes - 41 Basic quotes to learn - 52 Sample exam questions - 53