I've been teaching history for four years, and I aim to provide lessons that are ready to go with minimal tweaking just to personalise the resource to your class and their prior learning. I'm a big fan of paired discussion, group work, debates, living graphs and hot seating, and I provide a variety of tasks in each lesson to ensure learning happens at a pace and that all learning styles are catered for. All feedback gratefully received.
I've been teaching history for four years, and I aim to provide lessons that are ready to go with minimal tweaking just to personalise the resource to your class and their prior learning. I'm a big fan of paired discussion, group work, debates, living graphs and hot seating, and I provide a variety of tasks in each lesson to ensure learning happens at a pace and that all learning styles are catered for. All feedback gratefully received.
These assorted resources are designed to support your own teaching and provide a basis of knowledge for students to build on. They are not 'download and go' material, but do provide straightforward activities, an assessment and a research based homework task that are great if you are feeling a little frazzled. I'll talk you through what is included:
* 'Evacuation Research Homework' gives students a URL and a series of questions to answer based on what they read on the webpage.
* 'Evacuation Question and Answer matching task is extremely straight forward, you could use it as a starter or with an LA group it might be fun to cut out the questions and answers and ask the student to find their match.
* 'Evacuation Experiences Living Graph' and 'Evacuation Experiences Events' are a worksheet and a PP that give students 5 events in the journey of the evacuee and they flip a coin to decide if they get the positive experience or the negative experience. They plot these experiences on a living graph.
* 'Evacuation Accounts' is a real gem here, 11 primary source accounts of evacuation of a decent length to challenge your HA. Accounts range from recollections of evacuees to government leaflets. There is no accompanying task for this resource, but it is highly adaptable and extremely useful as a base of study. You would probably need about 2 mins to set questions from this resource and you would want to use only 3 or 4 of the sources at a time.
Many Thanks to Paul Durnall who gave me these
The main bulk of this is the newspaper task, designed to meet the following LOs
* ALL: Will be able to describe aspects of what happened at Dunkirk
* MOST: Will be able to support an opinion as to whether Dunkirk was a defeat or a victory
* SOME: Will be able to use the origin of the source to comment on whether the source is reliable.
* ONE or TWO... Might be able to use their analysis of source reliability to explain why they trust some sources over others and how this has affected their own overall judgement.
There is a presentation about Dunkirk with pictures and statistics, you may choose to deliver this yourself, or stick it up around the room for students to find and examine themselves. They may then read the interpretations/opinions sheet in which various sources give their verdict on Dunkirk, and the Dunkirk survivors sheet which does the same. Finally I have included an electronic template for the newspaper front page that the students will write, this could be set for homework over a VLE, or printed and handed out for students to fill in. If they are making handwritten copies, I would recommend having a stash of plain paper ready as most students prefer to establish the layout themselves.
Thanks to Paul Durnall who gave me parts of this.
You need a specific textbook to use this resource - if you download this without it, you will have to spend time pulling alternative resources together.
Lesson Outcomes:
ALL Will be able to describe at least two reasons why confidence in the President declined
MOST Will be able to assess which factor was most damaging
SOME will be able to link the factors
Lesson includes source analysis, independent research and structured explanations.
Edexcel Paper 1, Option F: In search of the American Dream LESSON 2 What is the American Dream?
Follow on from the intro lesson, this lesson uses the homework students were set in the first lesson as a task in this lesson. You could just print off some articles about the US in the news though and students could use those instead.
- Students identify themes in the news articles
- definitions of the American dream used and discussed as a basis for finding a class definition
This lesson uses political cartoons to draw out inferences about the political climate in the USA before and during the First World War. There is a homework for which students will need the Edexcel textbook which accompanies this course.
This lesson contains an essay structure for this question:
Were Republican ideas the main reason for the fact that there was a Republican president and a Republican majority in Congress in the years 1921-1931?
The lesson is centred around helping students to feel confident to have a go at this.
The Powerpoint contains images of Hoovervilles for students to see and for you to describe the effects of the Depression. The worksheet needs to be completed using the textbook.
ALL Will be able to describe Hoover’s actions and the effects of the Great Depression
MOST Will be able to explain Hoover’s limitations and the impact on public opinion of the Bonus Army
SOME Will be able to predict the impact of Hoover’s actions on the former popularity of Republicanism.
ALL Will be able to describe why Hoover didn’t win
MOST Will be able to identify detailed and relevant material to support their points
SOME Will be able to analyse the factors to show how they are connected
This lesson includes differentiated questions on the values and promises of Franklin D Roosevelt compared with the disaster Presidency of Hoover. Students will either need the textbook for this, or another resource on the Bonus Army.
These are the first ten lessons I have taught in this course, some of the lessons require you to have the textbook provided by Edexcel for this paper but where this is the case I have made sure to let you know in the description.
Edexcel A Level Paper 1 Option F: In search of the American Dream: the USA 1917-1996
This lesson is an introduction to the course, it gives the teacher an idea of what students already know about the USA and gives a snapshot of what the USA is like at the moment. There are also slides on the structure of the US government, but I usually give my own description with the slides as illustrations.
- Students name US states
- Students use own tech and existing knowledge to answer general knowledge questions
- homework which asks students to find an existing article about the USA today
- slides on structure of government
Designed to follow on from a study of crime and punishment in the Saxon period, students will also need prior knowledge of the basics of the Norman conquest (they need to know it was a violent and foreign occupation). This lesson is designed primarily for the GCSE Edexcel depth study 'Crime and Punishment' and is updated for the brand new 2018 GCSE.
This PowerPoint includes information and tasks with ideas for group work and differentiation included. It also includes a sample exam question on this topic with a suggestion for a writing frame.
Although the textbook is not explicitly referred it, it may help students to have one to hand. The Edexcel textbook is ideal, but the OCR or SHP will work just as well.
Lesson Objectives:
ALL Will be able to describe new crimes
MOST Will be able to explain how these new crimes were connected to the Norman Conquest
SOME Will be able to identify change and continuity in crime from Saxon times
Designed to be used for GCSE Crime and Punishment either Edexcel or OCR, you will need a textbook to support learning from this lesson as students will be prompted to find out information for themselves.
This PowerPoint is essentially a focal point for the lesson, it covers Thomas Beckett and Benefit of the Clergy, Church Courts and moral crimes. It covers the following Learning Objectives:
ALL will be able to describe how the Church affected law and order in Medieval England
MOST will be able to used precise historical detail to describe the role of the church
SOME will be able to evaluate who had more power over law and order; the church or the King.
Intended to give a very quick overview of Tudor England for students in KS4, this lesson gives students the key information they need to begin to study the crimes and punishments of Tudor times.
Learning Objectives:
ALL Students will be able to recall key facts about life in Tudor Times
MOST Students will be able to consider how these facts impacted on the monarch of the time
SOME Students will be able to predict what kind of laws the monarchs would have brought in to deal with threats to their rule.
This needs to be included in a scheme of work on American politics during this period as it helps structure an essay, but it doesn't provide new knowledge on content. The lesson is focused on how to pick out themes and structure an essay at A Level. Students come up with their themes as a class, but suggestions are made in the lesson, students assess a model paragraph to find the evidence and analysis present. Students structure their own paragraphs around the model paragraph structure.
The question this lesson considers is “The Vietnam War was the main reason the American public lost confidence in their President between the years 1968 and 1980” How far do you agree?
This lesson was designed to be part of a Scheme of Work on Edexcel AS/A Level history Paper 1, Option F: The American Dream
Intended for GCSE students either studying the OCR or Edxecel spec for Crime and Punishment, appropriate for both the new GCSE and the old, this stand alone lesson is designed to be used with a textbook. The SHP, OCR and Edexcel textbooks will all be fine for this lesson.
Lesson Objectives:
ALL Will be able to describe some of the reasons capital punishment ended
MOST Will be able to support their points with detailed evidence
SOME explain how these factors led to capital punishment ending
This lesson includes a clip about Derek Bentley, a table to be completed using the textbook, a triangle of importance and then an essay question that asks students to compare factors.
Standard board game that requires a dice and counters to represent the students playing. Students complete activity sheet as they play, using the knowledge they gained from the game.
Each square details something that might happen to a peasant to either cause them good fortune or bad and instructs students to move ahead or drop back a few spaces accordingly. As students play the game they have a range of activities to complete based on the information they find out in the game. They could do these as they play, or to consolidate what they have learned after.
Activities cover:
* the feudal system
* jobs of the peasant in each season
* factors affecting the peasant's life such as the weather
* matching pictures to the jobs of the peasant
* the roles of other people in the village such as the steward
This game is active learning that is student centred. Other than behaviour management, it is hands off for the teacher and enjoyable for students. This is appropriate to KS3.
Many thanks to Paul Durnall who gave this to me :-)
This lesson should follow on from either your own lesson on factory conditions, or my other lesson on factory conditions. The focus of the lesson is not new learning, it is practising the skill of assessing reliability based on the caption of the source. It doesn't go as far as NOP but allows students a more organic, paired or group discussion on whether a source is reliable. First you analyse reliability together, then students pass round sources and add their own notes to the bottom before completing a worksheet task.
NB. This lesson does not use the word 'bias' when examining sources as in my opinion, this leads students to stop analysing once they have decided that the source is biased. If instead they examine reliability, they are more able to take a balanced view on source reliability.
Learning Objectives: To know how to make inferences from the source (L5) and to know how to use the caption to decide how reliable the source is (L6)
Students analyse change using continuum bars. will also need previous learning on previous Presidents (Wilson onwards) and a textbook to refer to on Roosevelt's presidency. The 'Edexcel Paper 1: Searching for rights and freedoms in the 20th century' is what I use.
Tasks include:
chronological placing of Presidents
recall of previous facts learned about that President
an examination of FDR from the textbook
completing the worksheet on the continuum of change
This lesson is designed to be used with Access to History:‘Prosperity, Depression and the New Deal: The USA 1980-1954 by Peter Clements, but could be used with another resource if your resource is:
* of A level complexity or above (lesson skill focus is finding information in text)
* details the Supreme Court challenges made against the New Deal
* is no longer than 2 sides of A4
The skill focus is on finding information in text with a view to increasing student confidence in using the textbook and other more complex sources more independently. Tasks include 'skim it/scan it/scope it out' exercise, rephrasing complex concepts into student own words to improve comprehension, and differentiated tasks as per Blooms.
Students will also be fully informed about Supreme Court challenges to the New Deal and able to analyse the changing relationships within the US Federal government.
You need a textbook resource on the New Deal, or access to internet research for students to complete one of the tasks in this lesson. They just need basic information on the provisions of the new deal so they can summarise individual elements such as the NRA for each other.
Learning Outcomes
ALL Will be able to recall key facts about the New Deal
MOST Will be able to explain how the New Deal helped the economy
SOME Will be able to analyse the extent to which the New Deal altered the Presidency
Lesson includes:
Source analysis of a political cartoon
Student paired research
Student paired presentations
individual students select evidence to support the point that the New Deal changed the Presidency in its relationship with Congress and business.