This lesson is aimed at Year 8 mixed ability groups who are studying Stuart Britain and in particular the causes and affects of the Great Fire of London on the city. It beings with a Fire-Mark being shown and students should guess what the object. The lesson then works through several tasks which set the scene for the outbreak of the fire and uses a PPT slide from Boardworks to show an animated spread of the fire scene. There is a set of comprehension based questions which are based on sections from the Wilkes 'Renaissance, Revolution and Reformation' Textbook. There are several points where suggested progress checks could be utilised to check learning points. Students are then asked to make a judgement as to whether they agree or disagree with the statement 'The Great Fire of London was a blessing in disguise'.

This resources gets students to consider what makes a good Christmas Advert before watching and analysing several examples. To help students there is an example which is aimed to be a very good response for a middle/top set. More adverts could be added if you wish or you could extend the task at the end by getting students to peers assess each others work. Top sets and able groups could be encouraged to develop their own criteria for a good advert or for less able groups please use the criteria on the PowerPoint. Brilliant way to include a festive flavour to your lessons whilst keeping management happy with content and skills being taught until the end. Happy Christmas!

This lesson has been designed to be used at the end of the Christmas Term with students who have not yet studied the wider WW1 topic. It begins by getting students to list how they celebrate Christmas with visual prompts to help them. Then there is a brief introduction to Trench Warfare before the Sainsbury's Christmas Advert from 2014 is shown to get students to pick out features of the popular view of the truce. Then there is an information hunt for students to find out what really happened. The resources are all contained in one PowerPoint and will just need printing out and displaying around the classroom. The aim for this lesson was to be slightly less formalised but still a relevant and purposeful lesson in the run-up to the Christmas Break. I hope you find this useful and engaging for your students. Merry Christmas.

This is a quiz that I have created to use with my classes in the last week before Christmas. It contains four rounds of 6 questions which are general knowledge either about history or Christmas itself. The quiz is broken into two parts with a peer assessment for Part 1 and Part 2 to break up the lesson. I have recommended capping groups at 4 but you are obviously free to change this and increase/decrease it. There are some tricky questions included (e.g. a picture of a young Churchill for name the historical figure) but I have tried to make it accessible to keep students on-board. Merry Christmas.

This lesson begins by asking students to identify the typical scenes from Christmas Cards and then to design a new range of Christmas cards that have historical scenes on them. The ppt takes students through the task and gives clear success criteria for a good outcome. There is a handout to use that structures student's response. This lesson is firmly aimed as a fun, creative lesson to have before Christmas and therefore whilst there are clear learning objectives and a plenary included I would not use this lesson before the final lesson of term. Merry Christmas.

This is a brilliant lesson in which your students become members of the Witan which met in 1066 to decide on who to invite to become King following Edward the Confessor's death. The lesson gets students to work in a group to consider which candidate they would choose, and the reasons why. To make it even more interesting you can create voice overs that are messages from William the Conqueror explaining why he should be chosen. (The file format is unsupported on TES). The students will then vote as a class on who should become king. This then leads to the plenary in which students are informed of the outcome of the real Witan in 1066.

This lesson was designed for a low ability Key Stage 4 group who were about to start working on the Source Paper module. They really struggled to understand sources and how they are used by historians. This could be used for Key Stage 3 groups without difficulty. The basic idea is that you walk students through a imagine murder trial. The students are introduced to the evidence and have to complete a group activity where one student will act as the defence counsel for each of the 3 suspects, and the fourth will act as a judge having to make a judgment of who should be found guilty. It encourages students to assess and evaluate evidence and introduces ideas such as usefulness and reliability in a tangible way. With low ability groups I have given them a printed copy of the evidence table to help them. The students I have used this with have been totally engaged with the task and the only complaint from students that I've received is that I can't actually confirm the true killer - it was a totally invented storyline and I didn't even consider who the actual killer was.

These are placemats that I designed to use in my English/Humanities classroom to encourage students to improve their extended writing. It includes top tips for successful writing, visual prompts for varying sentence starters and tables with different connectives to chose from. These could be used as a specific aid in a lesson or be stuck to desks to allow students ready access to them during lessons. This can then form part of your verbal feedback where you can encourage students to improve their work by changing a sentence using a different sentence starter.

This lesson looks at the role of the USA in the outbreak of World War Two. It was planned as a single lesson to fit into a Year 9 module on the Interwar Years. I find that the novel nature of looking at the USA's responsibility often provokes a lot of reaction where students will be keen to give you their point of view. The lesson begins by analysing the 'Gap in the Bridge' cartoon (Source Frame included) which leads into the introduction of the lesson. There is then a card sort task that requires students to work in pairs to find evidence that the USA was or was not responsible for the outbreak of World War Two. This is then tested by a human agreement line across the classroom and the students then write up their own response to the statement that the 'Isolationism of the USA caused World War Two'. There are clear success criteria, differentiated card-sort sheets etc. available. I usually get students to peer assess using the success criteria as a plenary. Please let me know how you get on with this resource by reviewing it. Thank you for looking at my resources.

This is a pack which I created as part of a series of lessons looking at the Revolutions that took place in Europe during the 1917-1939 period. Its aim is to get students to realise the need for a range of methods of persuasion and control to be successful and the need to appeal to a wide section of society. This was used as a starter but I have used it since as a whole lesson task to great effect with students working through the work-booklet in groups of four and then reporting back at the end of the lesson. I have adjusted the document to make it more generic but it would have more impact if you personalise the booklet by changing the logo for your own schools and also adjusting the school structure to reflect the system your students are familiar with. It is a very good way to engage all students into considering the really difficult aspects of planning and executing a revolution and sets up perfectly a tangible reference point when dealing with the complex aspects of Modern European History. Whilst this has been developed for a history classroom it could quite easily be used in Citizenship or Politics lesson.

This is a lesson aimed at Key Stage Three classes who are studying the Tudors. It aims to introduce the students to the Tudor Monarchs and draw out prior learning about Henry VIII using the first two activities. Then using an information sheet on the Six Wives the students answer a question that seeks to evaluate the reasons behind Henry's 6 marriages. Optional starters are included to help introduce the Tudor Monarchs. There are example answers for modelling and success criteria that is levelled at three stages for students to use to self/peer assess and also a point of review. The final task lends itself to be delivered as a Post-It-Note plenary or a human agreement line.

This lesson gets students to place the events of the Gunpowder Plot into the correct chronological order. I have designed it to work for Key Stage 2 and weaker Key Stage 3 groups to enable students to know the key parts of the Gunpowder Plot. Also, students should begin to understand why the 5th November is important and remembered. The lesson begins by checking prior knowledge and then moves into a card-sort which includes clear dates to help students place events into the correct chronological order. From this students can then move onto identifying the reason why we still remember/celebrate the 5th November with a copy and complete task that requires them to choose the correct ending for the sentence 'We remember the 5th of November because...' The main task of this lesson is for the students to produce a cartoon strip of the Gunpowder Plot and there are clear success criteria for students to use. The plenary uses the success criteria to inform peer-feedback. As I have aimed this resource at both Primary and Secondary colleagues I have included a Teacher Guide slide that includes key information to help any non-specialists. If this was being used as a stand-alone resource for 5th November then it could be extended to creative tasks, such as, creating a wanted poster for Guy Fawkes, in literacy a diary entry from Guy Fawkes would be a good extension.