Ideally when teaching history, teachers will look to deliver projects that will engage and motivate, hopefully making the hard work of being creative stimulating and rewarding, based upon questioning, enquiry, investigation of sources and reaching conclusions grounded in the evidence.Ancient Egypt is one of those history topics which, because it...

Introduction A great deal has been written recently defining what is meant by creativity in primary education. And much has been written urging us to ‘teach creatively'. Yet there had been no exploration of what teaching creatively means in terms of teaching history until a group of colleagues and I...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. History is a subject which of necessity makes extensive use of language in all its forms and so the links with literacy are many. Cooper (2000), Bage (1999), Hoodless (1998) and Nichol, in the Nuffield History...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. From the late 1960s until 1989 history was almost universally taught in primary schools as an element in integrated crosscurricular programmes, normally social studies or humanities. The 1989/1990 National Curriculum: History radically changed this. It introduced...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. History is an important aspect of the development of even very young children. They need to begin to develop the foundations of an understanding of the past and how it has developed and affected our present....

Please note: This article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. Classic fiction provides useful sources of information for investigating the lives, beliefs and values of people in the past. In this article Ann Cowling describes activities undertaken with student teachers which may also serve as models...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. This is a reflection on a project, set up with a variety of different thoughts about education in its widest sense. Or, to put it another way, a primary school teacher's record of a unique...

Please note: This article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. Why teach children about architecture and the built environment? Because they shape the future and because they already change our architecture and define the public realm everyday through their actions. Learning about architecture and the built...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. A study of the local environment can make a vital contribution to children's sense of identity, their sense of place and the community in which they live. More importantly, a local study can enable children...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Section 1: Introduction Music is a powerful, emotive subject to enrich Historical, Geographical and Social Understanding. The Historical Association has a long and proud tradition of working closely with the Schools Music Association. In 2005, to...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Everyone loves a story - especially a story well told. To encourage learning all primary teachers should consider the creative art of telling a story, as well as developing a variety of ways of interacting through...

Please note: This article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. If you are considering studying someone other than Florence Nightingale you have two basic options. You can either choose a local character who would be more relevant to the children, or you could study someone who...

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. ‘Some primary schools are like the High Street in many of our towns. I can predict what I will see before I go through the door. What I want to see is something that gives me...

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 biggest issue for school history is its limited place in the curriculum.' (Ofsted, 2007) This central concern of Ofsted's 2007 report, History in the balance, could equally apply to the teaching of drama in primary schools....

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. 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,...

Children develop their understanding of the past through a range of historical sources of evidence. Written sources may provide different types of information for children to work from. Records such as census returns or street directories provide information about families and tradespeople living in a particular communities and old maps...