Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. The Nuffield Foundation-funded Leeds Community History Project brought together schools and older community members in the creation of community archives. It focused on articulating, valuing and recording the older generation's memories and knowledge. Its overarching...

Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. If you stop and look around you a curious mind begins to ask questions. This is one reason why the primary curriculum should introduce pupils to learning that draws from a broad range of subject...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. History and Art have been taught as traditional subjects for many years and as cross curricular subjects they compliment each other beautifully. I do not see how we can realistically completely separate them...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. Visual images, paintings, sculpture, photographs, cartoons from past times are important historical sources. Accordingly, Simon Schama embeds visual images and imagery in his historical oeuvre, not primarily as illustration but as a crucial...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. The Mantle of the Expert [MoE] dramatic system works quite simply whereby classes are first of all invited to imagine. Within this imagined world - the class view their world through the eyes of other people...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. ‘Ok children, time for history.' Distant moans from the back of the class. Would I be surprised by this reaction? No, not if the teacher was diligently following the QCA guidelines for teaching history. Yes, if...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. I have a very old photo in my ‘archive' taken in the 1970s of a much-younger me dressed in, what can only be described as, a vague suggestion of 18th Century costume - thread-bare jacket, a...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. If you are a little nervous of using drama in your history lessons, here is a safe way to start but look out for the many opportunities that arise for developing empathy, personal opinion, understanding of...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. It is now some seventeen years since the publication of our original pamphlet by the Historical Association [HA] as part of the Teaching of History Series (Wilson and Woodhouse, 1990). This article offers a personal review...

Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and links may be outdated. When I visit primary schools these days it heartens me to see how often drama is used in classroom teaching. Looking back over my own career, drama and role play have always been...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. There is a range of drama strategies that we use all the time. The important point is to select a strategy with which you feel confident. For example, the collective making of a map by the...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Drama puts the fear of God into some teachers. Some, jolly sensible souls, just don't feel dramatic, fear wearing feathered hats and using funny voices; others know, deep in their hearts, that plays always lead to...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. John Fines, Raymond Verrier and I frequently taught as a team trying to discover where drama work and history meet. We were interested in helping children get a grasp of past events which have influenced their...

Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated. In a primary school in Devon, there is a teacher who sings to his class every day: traditional songs; love songs; lyrical ballads; sea shanties; tales of mystery and suspense; songs of ritual and ceremony, hunting songs,...

Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. There are many effective ways of using artefacts and resources for the Victorians, but how many teachers have considered using the rubbish that the Victorians literally threw away? This material can cost nothing or be...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. The Science Museum in South Kensington, London is accessible through its website as well as through visiting the building itself and this article considers how history teachers can gain from using the collection and resources...

Alongside modern University buildings, at Beckett Park, (part of Leeds Metropolitan University), there is evidence of a monastic grange, a seventeenth century farmhouse, and an eighteenth century mansion which was extended in Victorian Times. The Beckett Park Archaeology Project was established in 1999 to give local children access to the...

It is a strange phenomenon of history education that the power of hats is little reported and little researched- so here is an article that says hats off to hats in history lessons, as well as hats off to artefacts, sound recordings and dressing up.

The literacy strategy is here to stay and has profound implications for the teaching of history in primary schools. Primary history practitioners realise, of course, that the literacy strategy presents challenges as well as opportunities. On the one hand, a more explicit emphasis upon the ‘basic’ skill of literacy means...