Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Pupils are eternally curious about their teachers. Do they really have lives outside the classroom? Could Miss Jones have once been a child? Does she have parents and grandparents and a past of her own? Caille Sugarman-Banaszak uses images in a variety of ways with her pupils, not just to hook their curiosity, but to provide them with a ladder which will help them step into the past. She brings her own past to the classroom in images of her ancestors, inspiring her pupils to look for the detail in her past. However, this article goes on to explore a myriad of uses for the image in the history classroom, including finding ‘Wally' in the works of Bosch and Bruegel. The major part of this article follows the author's explorations of the Jewish people in Poland as preparation for her pupils' field trip. Images of the present day places are set alongside mages of the same places in the past, providing pupils with a context to ground both their geographical and historical explorations. It is the personal discoveries of the history teacher that provide a framework to structure her pupils' learning journey.