I am a History Teacher with a love for producing high quality and easily accessible history lessons, which I have accumulated and adapted for over 20 years of my teaching career. I appreciate just how time consuming teaching now is and the difficulty of constantly producing resources for an ever changing curriculum.
I am a History Teacher with a love for producing high quality and easily accessible history lessons, which I have accumulated and adapted for over 20 years of my teaching career. I appreciate just how time consuming teaching now is and the difficulty of constantly producing resources for an ever changing curriculum.
The aim of this lesson is to decide if everyone celebrated VE Day and the end of the Second World War (World War II) in May 1945.
At first glance, it would appear so as famous pictures at Trafalgar Square show soldiers and civilians alike celebrating as well as the famous faces on the balcony at Buckingham Palace.
Students are also given information about the lead up to the German surrender in the form of a quiz, in which they have to choose the right options to gain points.
However, further investigation reveals the Americans were still fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, as well as prisoners of war still held captive around the world.
Students also have to consider the terrible losses people had gone through and therefore had little cause to celebrate.
I have also included some curious questions such as why did divorce rates surge at the end of the war or why were there rumours that soldiers were to be trained in jungle warfare?
There is lots of video evidence from the time to accompany the lesson as well as a talking heads plenary, which analyses which leader said what at the end of the war in Europe.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lesson and revisited at the end to show the progress of learning.
The resource includes retrieval practice activities, suggested teaching strategies and differentiated materials and comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
AQA GCE A Level 1C, The Tudors: England 1485-1603
This 59 page Revision Guide is broken down into 5 main sections: Henry VII, Henry VII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I.
This Revision Guide includes practice exam questions on both types and gives examples and tips on how to answer each.
I have been inspired to write this Guide by my students after they had complained about the difficulty of accessing and understanding the content provided by other Revision Guides and resources, including the AQA Democracy and Nazism course too.
The Guide is therefore clear, concise and content driven. It will enable all learners to achieve the higher grades with clear guidance on how to achieve them.
The information is also broken down into an easy to use format to aid the students. The Guide can be used for revision, interleaving, home learning as well as class teaching.
This Guide has been designed to be engaging, detailed and easy to follow and can be edited and changed to suit, It comes in both Word and PDF format.
Any reviews on this resource would be much appreciated. This Guide also compliments the lessons I have put on TES for the delivery of the whole course.
Please feel free to email me if you have any questions. My email address can be found by visiting my shop at TES: /teaching-resources/shop/PilgrimHistory
AQA GCSE Britain: Health and the People, C.1000AD to present
With revision constantly in full swing, I have started to make these revision workbooks which my Year 11 students love (as an alternative to death by PowerPoint).
We pick certain sections (as part of a revision programme) to revise and come up with model answers and discuss the best way to tackle each question in the best way, considering exam time constraints.
I print out the sheets in A5, which the students stick in their books and use to colour code
Students answer the questions next to or underneath the sheets.
They can also be used for homework or interleaving.
The resource comes in Word format if there is a need to change or adapt.
The Industrial Revolution
The aim of this lesson is to question how effective Victorian justice was.
This is an interesting and engaging lesson for students as they decide who was a criminal (from their looks), which were the most common crimes in the early 1800’s and what you could expect at a public hanging though some source analysis.
By the end of the lesson, students will be able to answer the following questions:
Why was it so easy to commit crime in the Victorian period in the early nineteenth century and if you were unfortunate to get caught what could you expect from Victorian justice?
What was the Bloody Code and why was the law so harsh to offenders irrespective in some cases of sex or age?
There are also three case studies to unpick and students are left questioning the morality and effectiveness of the punishments inflicted.
Please note that the reform of the criminal justice system is dealt with in other lessons such as the Victorian prison system and the setting up of the Metropolitan Police force by Sir Robert Peel and the abolition of the Bloody Code.
There are a choice of plenaries from hangman to bingo and heart, head, bag, bin which get the students to prioritise the most ‘effective’ methods used to deal with crime.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lesson and revisited at the end to show the progress of learning.
The resource comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
I have also included suggested teaching strategies to deliver the lesson and there are differentiated materials included.
Cold War
The aim of this extended lesson on the Vietnam War is to analyse its significance in the Cold War and the ideology of the Domino Theory.
The lesson will analyse its dubious beginnings and inception to the types of weapons used such as Agent Orange, the war crimes which followed at My Lai and the ensuing lack of support at home as well as the consequences for the civilian population of Vietnam.
So why did America fail to win this war despite overwhelming manpower, control of the air and sea and the most modern military weapons available at the time?
As a starting point, students focus on Paul Hardcastle’s 19 song and his reasons for writing it and analyse the photograph of Kim Phúc before examining the details surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.
They are given a number of differentiated tasks to analyse both American and Vietcong tactics to win the war (using printable worksheets) and the horrors surrounding search and destroy and the My Lai massacre, the tunnelling system as well as the use of napalm and agent orange.
At the end they will prioritise the reasons for Vietcong success and American failure and how this war played its key part in the Cold War.
The central enquiry of this and subsequent lessons is to ask why did civilians fear for their lives during the Cold War? Students will map out their ideas each lesson (which can be plotted in different colours or dates to show the progress of their learning and centred around the key question) and build up a picture of how these and different countries in the world responded and acted in this new nuclear age.
The resource comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change and is differentiated.
I have also included suggested teaching strategies to deliver the lesson.
AQA A Level 1C The Tudors: England 1485-1603
The aim of this lesson is assess the change and continuity in government between Henry VIII and his father before him.
Students will analyse the workings of government in both Henry’s reigns, such as the use of Parliament and the Privy Council and decide how much control their had, using a ‘control o’meter’.
Students are also introduced to his ministers for the first time in a model answer from which they can complete some exam practice and allocate marks accordingly, referring to a markscheme.
This will also enable them to see how differently Henry VIII ruled the country in comparison to his father, with Cardinal Wolsey appointed as Lord Chancellor and Thomas Cromwell as Chief Minister.
The plenary uses some animated flashcards, from which the students have to link key words and phrases to Henry VIII and his ministers.
There is an enquiry question posed at the start of the lesson and revisited throughout to show the progress of learning throughout the lesson and subsequent unit of work.
The lesson comes in PowerPoint format and can be changed and adapted to suit.
The lesson is differentiated and includes suggested teaching strategies.
The British Empire
The aim of this lesson is to discover who the Zulus were and how and why their fighting left a lasting legacy on the British Empire.
Students will also find out why the British army, allegedly the best and most disciplined fighting force in the world at the time be defeated and humiliated at the Battle of Isandlwana?
They will also analyse how within hours they were heroically defending their lives at Rourke’s Drift in one of the most unlikely ‘victories’ in British military history.
Students evaluate both battles, creating headlines and writing articles, using argument words and second and third tier vocabulary.
They finally appraise the events of 1879, concluding how both battles should be viewed overall in history and their legacy.
The lesson comes with retrieval practice activities, suggested teaching and learning strategies, differentiated materials and is linked to the latest historical interpretations, video clips and debate.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question posed at the start of the lesson and revisited at the end to show the progress of learning.
The lesson is fully adaptable in PowerPoint format and can be changed to suit.
This is the first in a series of lessons I have created on the Tudors.
This lesson is broken down into two parts. The first part describes and explains the events surrounding the Wars of the Roses.
Students learn about the Kings involved and the battles fought through fun tasks, video evidence and role play of which they have to make choices on the victors.
With this new found knowledge they have to explain what they have learnt through a ‘talk like an historian’ quiz.
The second part of the lesson focuses on the previous Tudor perceptions of Richard III. Was he really a deceitful and cunning person, ‘a lump of foul deformity’ with a hunchback according to Shakespeare, More and Virgil?
Archaeological evidence from King Richard’s remains is analysed by the students to prove or disprove some of these popular ‘misconceptions’ about his posture and character.
Students are then challenged to write to the current Education Secretary to make sure correct history lessons are now taught about Richard III in secondary schools.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lesson and revisited to show the progress of learning.
This lesson is fully resourced includes suggested teaching strategies, differentiated materials and comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
The aim of this test is to find out how much the students know about history.
The results will give you a baseline from which you can build upon. Once they begin to study history, they will begin to show progress in all areas, particularly in the amount of detail required in answers.
The test focuses on chronology, cause and consequence, change and continuity, historical enquiry, interpretation and significance.
This is a particularly useful assessment for a history department and as a starting point and ideally for Year 7.
Most students sadly will not have studied a lot of history at their primary schools (apart from the odd day to study the Victorians or World War 2) as literary, numeracy and SATS still dominate primary school curriculum planning.
The resource comes in Word and PowerPoint formats which can be amended and changed to suit.
This bundle is the first part in a series of lessons I have created for AQA GCSE 9-1 Elizabethan England 1568-1603.
Having taught this unit for a number of years, I have tweaked the order of lessons I now teach at the beginning.
As well as teaching Elizabeth I’s court, government and parliament, I have included Elizabeth’s favourites and an introduction to the religious settlement (which are offered as free lessons), as I felt students were getting confused without these aspects of the course being referred to early on.
The theme throughout this bundle of lessons is to examine how Elizabeth tried to assert her authority and control in the first half of her reign.
The lessons contain different tasks to challenge the students and are differentiated. Furthermore each lesson focuses on how to answer a GCSE practice question from the exam, notably in this unit a source, write an account and significance question.
The lessons are as follows:
L1: An introduction to Elizabeth
L2 Elizabethan Court and Government
L3 Which problems did Elizabeth face in her first ten years?
L4 Elizabeth and marriage
L5 Who were Elizabeth’s key people? (free resource)
L6 The Elizabethan Religious Settlement (free resource)
L7 Threats from the Norfolk and Ridolfi Plots
L8 The Essex Rebellion
L9 Catholic threats at home and abroad
L10 The Puritan threat
L11 The threat of Mary, Queen of Scots
The lessons are enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lessons and revisited at the end to show the progress of learning.
The resources includes suggested teaching strategies, retrieval practice, differentiated materials and come in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
Any reviews would be gratefully received.
AQA GCSE Conflict and Tension 1918-1945
This 28 page revision guide is tailored to the above AQA specification for GCSE. It is broken down into 3 main sections: Peace Keeping, the League of Nations and the Road to War.
This Revision Guide includes practice exam questions and gives examples on how to answer each. This revision guide will enable all learners to achieve the higher grades with clear guidance on how to achieve them. The questions target the four main questions in the exam from source analysis, chronology, cause and consequence, significance and evaluation.
The information is also broken down into an easy to use format to aid the students. The Guide can be used for revision, interleaving, home learning as well as class teaching. For home learning, each student taking GCSE History in my school has a copy assigned to them on the google drive and it is used frequently when using google classroom assignments, such as homework and revision for assessments.
This Guide has been designed to be engaging, detailed and easy to follow and can be edited and changed to suit, It comes in both Word and PDF format.
Any reviews on this resource would be much appreciated. Please email me for a free copy of any of my resources worth £3.00 if you do.
Edexcel GCSE 9-1 Medicine in Britain, c1250-present
These key individual flashcards aim to get the students thinking of key people and their significance in medicine.
I always find students have revised thoroughly for exams, but do not push their grades into the higher brackets as they focus on content rather than the individual’s impact and importance, particularly over time.
These flashcards are great when addressing the 12 mark ‘explain why’ question, particularly when arguing over rapid change.
There are 33 individuals listed, including those for the Historic Environment; The British sector of the Western Front. Individuals include Hippocrates and Galen, William Harvey, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, Florence Nightingale, Joseph Lister, John Snow, Alexander Fleming, Harold Gillies, Harvey Cushing and many more from the course.
Students can use them in class (I use them as starters and plenaries) or to take home and use for their own personal revision programme.
I also display them in the classroom (enlarged) and use when teaching this unit of study.
The resource comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
AQA A Level 1C The Tudors: England 1485-1603
The aim of this lesson is to evaluate the success of Elizabethan policies designed to help the poor.
The lesson begins with an explanation of the causes of poverty in Elizabethan England. Students also focus on attitudes towards the poor amongst Elizabethans and decide in a number of statements why poverty was feared so much in society.
Students also have to read in some extended writing an analysis of measures taken by the Government to alleviate poverty and then summarise their findings from it. There is a focus on the 1601 Elizabethan Poor Law and a source scholarship task which will allow them challenge and judge its impact and significance.
There is also a case study of Lord Burghley’s Almshouses in Stamford which highlights a growing sense of duty amongst wealthier Elizabethans to help and provide for the poor.
There is a choice of two plenaries which will test student’s knowledge on the legislation, help and attitudes towards poverty under Elizabeth I.
Finally some exam practice can be completed if required, complete with prompts and a comprehensive markscheme.
There is an enquiry question posed at the start of the lesson and revisited throughout to show the progress of learning throughout the lesson and subsequent unit of work.
The lesson comes in PowerPoint format and can be changed and adapted to suit.
The lesson is differentiated and includes suggested teaching strategies.
This lesson sets out to explains how Hitler set Germany on the road to the Second World War in 5 steps.
Students are challenged to find out how and why was he able to defy the Treaty of Versailles so easily with little or no consequences (shown through a causal spider’s web).
Students analyse video footage and a number of sources, using the COP technique (modelled for student understanding) which has proved invaluable for evaluating sources at GCSE.
A final chronological recap of the events and evaluation of the most and least important of the events that led to war, will give students an in depth understanding of why World War II started.
This lesson is ideal as preparation for GCSE if you are embedding source skills or teaching the interwar years or WWII at Key stage 4.
It is enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lesson and revisited throughout to show the progress of learning.
The resource includes retrieval practice activities, suggested teaching strategies and differentiated materials and comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
AQA GCSE 9-1 Germany 1890-1945: Democracy and Dictatorship
This 33 page Revision Guide is broken down into 3 main sections: Germany 1890-1918, the Weimar Republic 1918-1933, Nazi Dictatorship 1933-1945
This Revision Guide includes practice exam questions and gives examples and tips on how to answer each.
It will enable all learners to achieve the higher grades with clear guidance on how to achieve them. The questions target the main questions in the exam from interpretations and source analysis, cause and consequence, change and continuity, significance and evaluation.
The Revision Guide also gives the students some useful mnemonics to remember some of the key details such as the Treaty of Versailles, problems in the Weimar, recover under Stresemann and Hitler’s consolidation of power for example.
The information is also broken down into an easy to use format to aid the students. This Revision Guide can be used for revision, interleaving, home learning as well as class teaching. For home learning, each student taking GCSE History in my school has a copy assigned to them on the school's drive and it is used frequently when using google classroom assignments, such as homework and revision for assessments.
This Revision Guide has been designed to be engaging, detailed and easy to follow and can be edited and changed to suit, It comes in both Word and PDF format.
Any reviews on this resource would be much appreciated. Please email me for a free copy of any of my resources worth £3.00 if you do.
I have also made similar revision resources for AQA GCSE 9-1 include Britain: Health and the People c.1000 to the present day, Elizabethan England c,1568-1603, Conflict and Tension and Power and the People.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade KS3
The aim of this lesson is to analyse the conditions, impact and human cost of the Middle Passage.
The Middle Passage and its horrendous journey for the slaves is shown in this lesson through video, audio and source based evidence.
Students analyse historical interpretations of how the slaves were crammed together and the treatments they endured.
They then have to catalogue these conditions in a grid before trying to persuade a film director, who is making a film on slavery, that he is being misled about the journey. The advise the director is being given is from a slave ship owner, Captain Thomas Tobin.
Some differentiated key questions check their understanding through the lesson.
Students finally have to prioritise the worst conditions the slaves faced and justify their choices in an extension activity.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lesson and revisited to show the progress of learning.
The resource includes suggested teaching strategies, retrieval practice, differentiated materials and comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
This is the complete bundle in a series of lessons I have created for AQA GCSE 9-1 Britain: Health and the People, c.1000-present.
I have taught this course for more than 20 years now and have decided to completely overhaul my lessons to bring them up to date with the latest teaching and learning ideas I have picked up.
Furthermore I have dispensed with learning objectives to focus on specific enquiry based questions which address skills required for the GCSE questions.
As well as focusing on GCSE exam practice questions, the lessons are all differentiated and are tailored to enable the students to achieve the highest grades. They are also fully resourced and contain easy to print worksheets.
The lessons will allow students to demonstrate (AO1) knowledge and understanding of the key features and characteristics of the periods studied from the impact of Hippocrates and Galen on medieval medicine to the new ideas of the Renaissance, the laissez-faire approach of preceding Governments through to modern day Government and the nanny state.
They will study (AO2) second-order concepts such as change and continuity in the development of ideas about disease as well as the causes and consequences of medical treatment throughout the ages
The analysis and evaluation of sources (AO3) are used in for example, surgery, Public Health and the introduction of the NHS whilst substantiated judgements are made (AO4) on the discovery and development of penicillin, the development of the welfare state and the influence of the seven factors in medicine.
The lessons are as follows:
L1 An introduction to the course
L2 Hippocrates and Galen
L3 The influence of the Christian Church
L4 Islamic Medicine (free resource)
L5 Doctors and surgeons in the Middle Ages
L6 Public Health in the Medieval towns
L7 The Black Death and the Plague
L8 Renaissance Medicine
L9 Medicine in the 17th and 18th Century (free resource)
L10 John Hunter
L11 Edward Jenner and smallpox
L12 Surgery in the 19th Century
L13 Florence Nightingale and hospitals
L14 Pasteur, Koch and Tyndall
L15 Public Health in the 19th Century
L16 Liberal Reforms
L17 Medicine and war (free resource)
L18 Magic Bullets and the Pharmaceutical Industry
L19 Penicillin
L20 The NHS
L21 How to answer the factor question
The lessons are fully adaptable in PowerPoint and can be changed to suit.
Please note that setting a full mock examination in class after completing each unit is strongly recommended (L1-7, L8-15 and L16-21).
All the examination resources and markschemes are subject to copyright but can easily be found on the AQA website.
Unfortunately TES restrict bundles to 20 lessons and therefore please download Lesson 17 separately, which is a free resource.
The British Empire
This lesson focuses on the role Gandhi played in achieving Indian independence from Britain which ultimately cost him his life.
The first part of the lesson looks at why the Indian population were unhappy with British rule, from the Indian Mutiny of 1857, events happening abroad to the Rowlatt Act culminating in the Amritsar Massacre.
They are then introduced to Gandhi, his philosophy of passive resistance (or as he called it satyagraha) and why he set up his Independent Congress Party. This is accompanied with some excellent video footage from the BBC as well as clips from the film ‘Gandhi’ by Sir Richard Attenborough.
The second part of the lesson centers around his life and by analysing various sources from which they complete either a table or grid; students then have to decide how big a part Gandhi played in many events leading to Independence and his lasting legacy for India in 1947.
The lesson comes with retrieval practice activities, suggested teaching and learning strategies, differentiated materials and is linked to the latest historical interpretations, video clips and debate.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question posed at the start of the lesson and revisited at the end to show the progress of learning.
The lesson is fully adaptable in PowerPoint format and can be changed to suit.
The Suffragettes
The lesson focuses on the main differences between the Suffragists and Suffragettes, but also examines their similarities in their aim of votes for women.
Students are asked as to why women wanted the vote and how were they going to achieve it?
Further into the lesson, students have to analyse the various methods used by both groups (peaceful protest vs militant tactics) and have to question, prioritise and justify their effectiveness in women’s rights campaign history.
A differentiated plenary questions and checks their understanding of the lesson and the aims of Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett.
The lesson is enquiry based with a key question using a lightbulb posed at the start of the lesson and revisited to show the progress of learning.
The resource includes suggested teaching strategies, retrieval practice, differentiated materials and comes in PowerPoint format if there is a wish to adapt and change.
AQA A Level 1C The Tudors: England 1485-1603
I have produced this bundle of resources on Edward VI and Mary I to help A level history students access the course and make some of the ideas, themes and concepts of the Tudors more comprehensible.
Edward VI: Most of the historiography of Edward places him at the periphery of the reign. However this bundle of lessons challenges this view and sets out to reappraise his monarchy.
Therefore the enquiry question throughout this bundle of resources will be to question how fit was Edward to rule during his reign.
Students will learn how cold and callous Edward could be from his chronicle and how much of a leading role and contribution he played in the English Reformation.
They will judge the significance of the Dukes of Somerset and Northumberland and how they tackled the problems of finance, the economy, law and order, religion and foreign policy.
Students will also compare the two Dukes and decide whose rule could be judged a success and why ultimately they both fell from grace.
Finally they will about the key reformers and the new Evangelicals during the reign of Edward VI such as Archbishop Cranmer, Bishop John Fisher and John Hooper and the impact they had on the Edwardian Reformation.
Mary I: Mary’s reign has traditionally been given a negative historiography. This bundle of lessons will challenge this interpretation and whilst justifying it in some cases, also argue that Mary was in many instances courageous, decisive, successful and determined.
Therefore the enquiry question throughout this bundle of resources will be to question if a woman was fit to rule England.
Students will learn the background to which Mary ascended the throne, assess her priorities as Queen and challenge the traditional view of Mary from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.
They will evaluate the significance of her Government and the role of Parliament as well as her marriage to Philip II of Spain and the consequences this brought as she was sucked into the Habsburg-Valois conflict, with the loss of Calais.
Furthermore they will compare and contrast the Counter Reformation with the religious changes introduced by Edward and the wider implications of Mary’s reforms with Marian martyrs.
Finally, students will judge the similarities of the economic situation she inherited from her half brother and the differences she made in laying many of the foundations for the success of subsequent monarchs.
The lessons are as follows:
L1 Introduction to Edward
L2 The rise of Somerset (free resource)
L3 Rule of Somerset
L4 Rise of Northumberland
L5 Rule of Northumberland
L6 The Edwardian Reformation
L7 Introduction to Mary I
L8 Aims of Mary I
L9 Mary I and her government
L10 Mary I marriage and Wyatt’s Rebellion
L11 The Counter Reformation
L12 Marian Martyrs
L13 Mary’s Foreign Policy
L14 Mary I and the economy
The lessons include the two types of exam question used, with examples of how to tackle them, using helpful hints and tips, structuring and scaffolding as well as markschemes. However, please refer to the AQA website for further assessment materials as they are subject to copyright.
The lessons are also differentiated and fully resourced and allow students to reach the very top marks.
This is the third bundle of resources I have created for this unit and hope to complete the rest of the course very soon.
If you have any questions about the lessons, please email me via my TES shop, or any other information about the course.
I would also welcome any reviews, which would be gratefully appreciated.
