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Using the back cover image: Mummified cat
Primary History feature
For hundreds of years, travellers to Egypt have marvelled at the amazing monuments evident throughout the country. The treasures of Ancient Egypt became more fascinating after the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799, which led to the deciphering of the hieroglyphic language. Many Victorian explorers returned to their European...
Using the back cover image: Mummified cat
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Teaching the First World War in the primary school
Article
The current commemorations of the First World War have opened the door to some real opportunities for those teaching primary history – perhaps even considering taking children to the battlefields. Although this is customarily a secondary-school experience, this article outlines the opportunities for primary-age children. The suggestions here are based...
Teaching the First World War in the primary school
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Move Me On 164: Similarity & Difference
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: Sam Holberry is getting very confused about the concept of similarity and difference
Sam Holberry has returned to his main training school after a short placement in another school. Although he found it challenging to work with students he didn’t know, he enjoyed seeing a wider range...
Move Me On 164: Similarity & Difference
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Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
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The first trans-Atlantic hero? General James Wolfe and British North America
Article
Early on the morning of 8 June 1758, British frigates unleashed their broadsides upon French shore defences at Gabarus Bay, on the foggy and surf-lashed island of Cape Breton. Under cover of the warships' guns, a motley flotilla of craft headed towards the land. Propelled by straining Royal Navy oarsmen,...
The first trans-Atlantic hero? General James Wolfe and British North America
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My Favourite History Place: Mandala House
Historian feature
Many myths surround David Livingstone and in this part of the world more myths about the man abound than perhaps anywhere else. We can only speculate on whether he fought off lions with his bare hands, shamed slave-traders into letting their slaves go with just a few words from the scriptures...
My Favourite History Place: Mandala House
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Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
Teaching History article
Jamie Byrom describes the learning activities within a final enquiry for a National Curriculum area of study - Britain 1066-1500. The strong message in this article is that the learning in each enquiry is only as good as the planning and teaching of the enquiries that precede it. Byrom's model...
Why go on a pilgrimage? Using a concluding enquiry to reinforce and assess earlier learning
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How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
Teaching History article
What is the difference between using lots of ICT and using it well? Dave Atkin draws upon work in his own department and with other Gloucestershire teachers in order to identify criteria for effective ICT use. These boil down to ‘putting history first' and getting maximum value out of the...
How can I improve my use of ICT? Put history first!
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'Didn't we do that in Year 7?' Planning for progress in evidential understanding
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell describes a lively activity, ideal for Year 9, in which pupils compare and interrelate a collection of sources. The activity leads pupils into thinking about the sources as a collection, and about the enquiry as an evidential problem. Or at least it can do. The article discusses the...
'Didn't we do that in Year 7?' Planning for progress in evidential understanding
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Effective Primary History Teaching, Challenges and Opportunities
Primary History article
“It’s like they’ve gone up a year!” This was the unprompted observation of a teaching assistant at Buckden Primary School last summer, supporting Giles Fullard, a secondary history teacher from Hinchingbrooke School, near Huntingdon leading a lesson with a year 6 class on “Was Boudicca Britain’s first hero?” The scheme...
Effective Primary History Teaching, Challenges and Opportunities
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Move Me On 163: Ahistorical thinking
Teaching History feature
Jane Whorwood’s concern to encourage students to think for themselves is leading to some very ahistorical thinking.
Jane Whorwood has proved to be a generally confident and positive trainee, largely due to two years’ experience as a cover supervisor before committing to a formal training programme. She has made a...
Move Me On 163: Ahistorical thinking
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Out & About: On the Somme
Historian feature
Paula Kitching demonstrates how to interpret and understand the memorial features of the Somme landscape.
One hundred and five years ago, a piece entitled ‘Out and about on the Somme’ would have been a travel piece for would-be tourists to the French countryside. The rolling hills and valleys provide a...
Out & About: On the Somme
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Our Iron Age challenge
Developing historical understanding through building an iron age house
The University of Chichester’s three-year BA (Hons) Degree for Primary Education and Teaching involves learning how to provide rigorous and creative educational opportunities for children. The course involves one creativity module each year. The final one involves the development of skills and confidence in creating problem-solving.
Four of us were...
Our Iron Age challenge
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Primary history and British values
Article
In this article, Michael Maddison provides an overview of what schools must do in relation to promoting British values, as well as preventing extremism and radicalisation, and why it is so important that opportunities are taken in history to deal with these two pressing issues. It is an updated version...
Primary history and British values
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Using original sources
Primary History article
Why would I want those old books in my classroom?
It has always been recognised that good primary history is able to connect the past with the world the children currently inhabit. That is why focusing on schools can be so useful. If there is one experience the children have...
Using original sources
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The Willing Suspension of Disbeliefs
Article
There should be no hesitancy doubting his existence R. G. Collingwood is remembered today as a philosopher, a man with a wide range of interests, the core of whose work is in the Idealist tradition. He died in 1943 and although his work has subsequently not been widely celebrated the...
The Willing Suspension of Disbeliefs
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What is progress in history?
Teaching History article
Evelyn Vermeulen argues that in order for teachers to identify outcomes for the learning of history, they must think clearly about the different attributes of the discipline - its ideas, structures and processes - and the relationship between them. Here, she takes us on her own professional thinking journey. She...
What is progress in history?
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The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
Teaching History article
Jenny Parsons' work in primary-secondary liaison in history is nationally acclaimed. She is often asked to share her department's practice at courses and conferences. Readers of Teaching History are already familiar with her work in another area: in the ‘Triumphs Show' of Teaching History 93 (the ICT edition in November...
The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audience-centred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3
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My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
Teaching History article
History teachers are waking up to the fact that you cannot raise standards in GCSE by very much if you leave this work until Year 10. To leave it that late is to resort to surface, tactical moves rather than to address the deep reasons why so many pupils find...
My essays could go on forever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE
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Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
Teaching History feature
As Kristin Ross has persuasively argued, by the 1980s interpretations of the French events of May 1968 had shrunk to a narrow set of received ideas around student protest, labelled by Chris Reynolds a ‘doxa’. Media discourse is dominated by a narrow range of former participants labelled ‘memory barons’ –...
Polychronicon 162: Reinterpreting the May 1968 events in France
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Climate change: greening the curriculum?
Teaching History article
Inspired by the news that Bristol had become the UK’s first Green Capital, Kate Hawkey, Jon James and Celia Tidmarsh set out to explore what a ‘Green Capital’ School Curriculum might look like. They explain how they created a cross-curricular project to deliver in-school workshops focused on the teaching of...
Climate change: greening the curriculum?
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Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
Teaching History article
How nominalisation might develop students’ written causal arguments
Frustrated that previously taught writing frames seemed to impede his A-level students’ historical arguments, James Edward Carroll theorised that the inadequacies he identified in their writing were as much disciplinary as stylistic. Drawing on two discourses that are often largely isolated from...
Using nominalisation to develop written causal arguments
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Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
Teaching History article
Alex Alcoe was concerned that mastery of certain keywords and question formulae at GCSE perhaps obscured fundamental gaps in his students’ understanding of the nature of causation. These gaps were revealed when he invited Year 12 students to make explicit, by annotating a diagram, their understanding of the relationship between...
Using causation diagrams to help sixth-formers think about cause and effect
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Beyond compare a study of Beatrix Potter and Benjamin Zephaniah
Primary History article
The Key Stage 1 National Curriculum encourages teachers to teach their pupils about ‘the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements.’ (DfE, 2014, p. 205). Some teachers have begun to move away from the old favourite subject of Florence Nightingale and as...
Beyond compare a study of Beatrix Potter and Benjamin Zephaniah
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My Favourite History Place: Tivoli Theatre
Historian feature
The Tivoli Theatre opened on 24 August 1936 with Jean Adrienne in Father O’Flynn and Shirley Temple in Kid in Hollywood, with film star Jean Adrienne appearing in person. It was designed by Bournemouth-based architect E. de Wilde Holding. The front of the building was an existing Georgian-style building named Borough House. Inside the auditorium there...
My Favourite History Place: Tivoli Theatre
