mrthorntonteach

This page will feature ideas, resources and curriculum posts from the our KS£ curriculum.
Links included to files, videos etc.

---

Liverpool and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Industrial Revolution

Liberty’s Dawn: Workbook

This is my edit of the Liberty’s Dawn workbook created for our Industrial Revolution unit. My colleague Catherine kindly made the original using a number of resources from (Rachel Ball, Hannah Cusworth & Elizabeth Carr) and I’ve turned it into a workbook for our LAP Y8 classes.

This version has been edited in both content/tasks/scaffolding to make it suitable for those students in our lowest sets, but whilst keeping the rigour of a unit that focuses on Emma Griffin’s interpretation.

Thanks to many out there for the inspiration, especially Jacob Olivey for his ‘How historians work’ slide which I bastardised for this.

The Silk Roads

These are my lessons for our Silk Roads unit, ‘What travelled along the Silk Roads?’.

This version has been edited in both content/tasks to make it suitable as a base for Remote Learning, allowing teachers to add/amend as such with any online tools required. These lessons are very much my first draft of these and will be reworked for the return to classroom based teaching (yay!), feedback is welcome as I’m certainly not an expert.

Thanks to many out there for the inspiration and work I have reused, especially Tom Pattison, David Hibbert, Jen Thornton and others who’s resources I’ve amalgamated.

The First World War

Forgotten Armies of WW1

This stand alone lesson, which will form part of our new WW1 EQ in 2021, utilises the outstanding work of Paula Lobworth who created a fantastic unit using the work of David Olusaga in The World’s War, alongside the contribution of Hannah Cusworth to Oak National using Paula’s work (here).
Eventually, I will do a short EQ on this but as I’m ahead with this class, I wanted to do a taster session.

This lesson is for remote learning to our Y8 intervention classes, and would need some editing/upscaling if used elsewhere. I’ve decided to zoom on the life of Ganga Singh here using Paula’s excellent narrative from her blog as a way of revealing conditions on on the Western Front.

We’ve covered the trenches in depth already, so this provides a nice addition and allows us to look for similarity/differences. As usual, I’ve tried to embed some TWR strategies into the final written activity.

If its useful, download here (Apologies for any typos!)

The Interwar Period, a narrative overview.

This narrative overview covers the ‘Interwar period’, the name itself a misnomer which we touch on in the reading, and is part of our Year 8 curriculum

The plan with these overviews we use is that we sit them at the start of a time period to provide the big picture of where our subsequence enquiries are placed, allowing students to tether their new substantive knowledge from the EQs to the chronological framework. I remembered this blog post by Tom Sherrington, about ‘Big Picture, then Zoom in‘ and I think these do these well. I would liken these narrative, in part, to Mike Hills work on worldbuilding, as providing this overview allows students to get this sense of period and even place, and I plan to use images from the 1920-30s, on the board to supplement my reading.

This overview sits in this sequence from our Year 8 curriculum, with the enquiries either side ranging from 3 lessons to 7 in length.
– Causes of WW1 EQ
– The First World War EQ
– Interwar Narrative Overview
– The Russian Revolution EQ
– Comparison of the 1920s EQ
– Who ‘won’ WW2? EQ
– Local History EQ

What does this look like in the lesson?
We spend an hour on these in class. The teacher leads the reading of the document to the class, which is punctuated by questioning, discussion and annotation of the overview. The readings also provide us with an opportunity to engage pupils extended texts on a more regular basis.

The idea of these narrative overviews came from the brilliant Natalie Kesterton (@n_kesterton) whose article in TH176, on ‘Plugging the gaps’ was a real breakthrough in my thinking on how to keep our 2 year KS3 coherent. I would highly recommend reading it, it is excellent and I’ve definitely bastardised her narrative and big pictures to create my own monstrosities on the Interwar Period, Early Modern Britain, 1700-1900 and soon the Medieval period.

Writing this narrative was a challenge but special thanks to Ben Walsh (@history_ben) for his Modern World History textbooks, Dan Snows podcast on the Interwar Period, Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century and lastly the Historical Associations ‘Exploring and Teaching, Twentieth Century History’ which was my first go to for the period. I would highly recommend reading it.