From freeze frame to performance

Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.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 motivation, decision making and and problem solving that will bring alive your history lessons.

This project is based on the famous story of The Roses of Eyam set in the plague year of 1665. Eyam, in Derbyshire, was a small village at the time that had the misfortune to contract plague through a flea-infested bundle of cloth delivered to a local tailor from London. As villagers developed the symptoms of plague and died they had to consider how they, as a community, should react. Their decision to quarantine the whole village...