It takes time to give young children the concept of time. You have to say things like, “When your mum’s mum was little” or “when the school was built”. Our school is Victorian. We like to use real objects to build up pupils’ understanding of history, so we start from their own experience. One successful lesson we have taught in Year 2 is aimed at the curriculum target of placing events and objects in chronological order.

You warm up by getting pupils to bring in their own furry hot water bottle covers. Start the discussion by asking them how they keep warm in the day, with hats and coats and scarves and gloves. And indoors, with heating. What kind of heating? Then at night, with covers, electric blankets. How do hot water bottles work? Then we ask: have people always had these ways of keeping warm? That gets them thinking.

You are constantly being confronted with evidence of children’s mystification at the world. That is why objects they can handle are so good. We are lucky: we have a stone hot water bottle and a brass warming pan. We get them to feel these, to notice that the stone is cold without water, that the brass pan is very heavy.

Then come the activities. We ask pupils to put the objects into historical order, to draw them in use, and write a sentence about each. Then we ask them about the materials. Which was first: brass, stone, rubber? How were they were used? (The brass pan was filled with hot coals by servants.) Next we try to place in chronological order another sequence: maybe working back from central heating to open fires.

Then we look at their drawings. Who lights the fires? Why did the materials change? What kind of house goes with this heating?

There are plenty of possibilities for linking across the curriculum. You might use the story of the “Three Little Pigs” to talk about different houses and materials; to make lists as suggested in the literacy strategy. You might link up with the science of materials: whether stone or brass is a good conductor of heat, why it would be used. You might ask pupils to write to a friend, explaining how they got their new stone hot water bottle.

The most important thing is that pupils begin to understand that the past is still here in some form and that they can connect to it.

Peter Gordon is headteacher of Hazelwood Infants School, Enfield, Hazelwood is a beacon school