History Activities for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee

Activity One – Through The Years
Year 4 to Year 6

There’s a lot of free software which is easy for children to work with and which can produce really worthwhile outcomes. One of my favourite is Windows Live Movie Maker which comes as part of the Windows 7 operating system although versions of it appear with earlier operating systems. We use the software primarily for simple editing of videos that the children take on school trips or of drama activities but it can also be used for putting together a slick photo montage which can be run as a narrated slide show or with a soundtrack. It really is easy to use and it’s only the fine tuning that would need the patience and skills of older children.

Depending on how detailed you want to do this you can either use a timeline of the decades of the queen’s reign such as found on:

http://www.chiddingstone.kent.sch.uk/homework/war/timeline2.html or

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/timelines/british/index_embed.shtml

or get a grandparent in to talk about many of the events that have happened over the course of the queen’s reign.

Now, armed with a list of the main events, talk with the children about the significance of events such as the first colour television or the first female prime minister in order to give them a bit more information on them. They should be more aware of events that have happened in the last decade.

Ask them to look for pictures of two events from each decade and to find pictures of them. Save them into a folder for easy access after they’ve completed this part of the work.

Now find some music from each of the decades. It won’t cost much to download from iTunes and save them where the children can access them from their workstation.

Ask the children to open Windows Live Movie Maker and click the icon to ‘Add Videos and Photos’ They can extend or shorten the length of time the pictures are visible by repeating the process then shortening the time for the playback in ‘Edit’. Each frame is in place for a second so shortening by a second removes one frame. Once the pictures are in place you can overlay a narration by recording in Sound Recorder for the duration of each photo or use a piece of music from iTunes and clicking ‘Add Music’. You can add music at any point and cut it where required. You can fade music in and out too for a more professional feel.

Activity Two – I Was There
Year 2 to Year 6

To begin this activity let the children look at the video of the Queen’s coronation from 1953. This is available on YouTube in handy little chunks. The most important parts for this activity are part 2 and part 7 which can be found at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORMN48SdQJE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HAXgmeXglk

Ask the children to watch the video carefully noting what happens to the queen during the ceremony and in the second video, what the crowd is doing.

Once they’ve watched the video, discuss with them what they’ve seen and ask them to imagine being there and how they would describe the day. They should write their story under the title ‘I Was There’.

Activity Three – Royal History
Year 3 to Year 6

We are all focused on the history of what happened around the world and in the UK during the sixty years of the queen’s reign but few stop to consider the family history of the queen. We think of her so much in her public persona that we lose sight of her role as part of a family.  To redress this it’s a nice idea to ask the children to research the history of the royal family over that sixty year period beginning with the moment the queen was told that her father, George VI had died and that she was now queen. You could even step it back a few years to the marriage of the queen to Prince Philip and begin there. We’ve found that the completed task gives a sensitive insight to a woman whose family role has had to fight against her national and international responsibilities.

The task can be completed at a number of levels. From the simplest as a diary style piece for family events such as the birth, marriage and deaths of members of the royal family, to the long trips abroad and how the public have perceived her and other royals over the decades. Older children might want to add what they think the queen might have thought about events such as the divorce of two of her children. Read the best out upon completion and a moving account of the queen as a person, rather than a head of state, emerges.

Activity Four – Where is She From?
Year 3 to Year 6

Children love investigating and this activity allows them to investigate one of their favourite topics, family trees. The queen’s family tree is available in plenty of places online and using it helps us to understand the alliances forged across Europe in the last two centuries or more. Many think of the queen as English through and through but an investigation of her ancestry shows a different story.

For this activity you can begin with a simplified family tree going back four or more generations. On it you’ll have the queen’s parents, grandparents etc. but also cousins who in the past have married people from other countries. On a simple scale, identify which countries the queen’s ancestors have come from and work out what ‘blood’ she has in her. The older children love the competitiveness of trying to find the fraction that is German, French, etc.

Older children can research the family tree themselves looking for her sister, her parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, great aunts and uncles and so on. They can construct a family tree before finding out ‘where is the queen really from?’

Dave Lewis
Primary Teacher

Primary - Using Dickens in History

Activity One – What Happened During Dickens’ Lifetime?
Year 2 to Year 6

So much of history is difficult to understand because the context is difficult for children to grasp. As teachers we often try to give the children an idea by saying, ‘back when your grandparents were born’ or ‘after the Romans but before the Tudors.

If we try to teach the children about Charles Dickens, not only do the children have to get their heads around a funny looking old man who wrote stories but also try to place him in history.

A better way of doing this, especially with recent history, is to contextualise it with contemporary events.
Charles Dickens was born in 1812 and died in 1860. He lived through the heydays of the industrial revolution and the empire as well as the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Using the span of his lifetime, ask the children to research and ‘fit in’ to it, the main events of the time. You can ask them to find the events themselves but the difficulty with that is that they are likely to come up with obscure ones that they won’t understand.

Instead look for around eight to ten important events and ask them to find out the dates and the story of the event and plot them on a timeline. It’s a small, but worthwhile exercise to ask them to draw Dickens at the age he would have been at the time. Some children think that events in someone’s lifetime happen when they are adults but events happen all the time, even when we are children.

Some suggestions are:
-    Dickens was three years old when Wellington won the Battle of Waterloo defeating Napoleon.
-    He was 13 years old when the first train carried its first paying passengers.
-    He was 25 when Victoria became queen
-    When he was 28, the first letter using a stamp was posted.
-    A year before he died, Isambard Brunel built a revolutionary new bridge linking Devon and Cornwall.
Use the website http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/interactive/timelines/british/index_embed.shtml to help you.
The children could also illustrate their timeline ready for display.

Activity Two – The Contemporaries of Dickens
Year 3 to Year 6

So much of history is taught through events but of equal interest are the people of history.
A great activity is to organise a ‘Dickensian’ evening and ‘invite’ Charles Dickens and his famous contemporaries to it.

Each child should be encouraged to research famous people who were alive at the same time as Dickens such as Napoleon, Wellington, Victoria, Brunel, Peel and more.

They can then choose who they want to be and must research the person and arrange for a suitable costume.
Invite parents along to the evening at which the children can introduce themselves before mingling with parents as their character ‘in role’.

Done very well, the activity can also act as a battle of egos and if the characters would have met in real life, give an indication of their interaction. 

Activity Three – The Industrial Revolution
Year 4 to Year 6

The subject matter for many of Charles Dickens’ work was the living conditions and poverty of the people who were affected by the industrial revolution. Again, out of context, children often fail to understand why the people were poor or how they had got into that situation.

For that reason it’s worthwhile finding out a little about the industrial revolution and its effect on the people of Britain.

The best way to do it is by flow chart as it’s very much a story of cause and effect.
Write the key facts of the industrial revolution on sets of cards, post it notes or as notes on an interactive white board and together try to order them using arrows to indicate cause and effect.

Key facts to include are:
-    New farming methods make large scale farming more profitable needing a smaller workforce.
-    New or more efficient forms of power developed, reducing workload.
-    New machinery invented which can vastly increase output whilst reducing labour.
-    Greater demand for manufactured products requiring larger workforce.
-    Growing markets through the empire requiring more products.   
-    Development of cities
-    Child labour
-    Growth of schools
-    Migration from country to city
-    Emigration to new countries

The exercise is a good one for developing the important notion that in history every cause has an effect and that often, several link together and will help the pupils in future historical investigations to understand why some events happened.

Activity Four
Year 3 to Year 6

The subject of this set of activities is the great novelist Charles Dickens and it wouldn’t be right to work on the topic without an understanding of the man.

We are going to do a biography of the man but in the format of ‘Did you know…’
This way, instead of a long piece of writing all we need from the children are some facts about the man, written as sentences, or at most, short paragraphs. We’ll put up a life sized picture of him then append the facts around the picture.

Other children in the school will be able to find out more about him just by reading one or two facts as they pass the display.

Give the children different material to use to research the facts including books, encyclopaedias and the internet. Whilst the children will think of using books as a bit archaic, it’s useful to practise a range of research skills rather than simply type a question into a search engine.

Dave Lewis
Primary teacher

Primary - Bread Making

As well as being great fun, bread making takes us back to the very basics of food production and to a time when a happy accident led to flour, contaminated with natural yeasts was left longer than usual on a warm day and began to rise. The cooked bread was found to be lighter and easier to eat and so a revolution in food was born.

Activity One - Looking at natural microbes

There are many microbes in the world around us which, in their quest for survival, feed off natural sugars and protein,s causing them to decay. These produce moulds and gases of which some are harmful and some are helpful.

The children can test for the presence of microbes around them by leaving bread, cheese and fruit out in the air, in a safe place, and note the changes that happen over the course of a few weeks. What we see is the microbes feeding off sugars and proteins and developing fruiting bodies which we call mould. Now mix some fresh or dried baker’s yeast with warm water and sugar and leave it somewhere warm but ventilated. After 30 minutes to an hour they should be able to observe frothing of the mixture and a pungent smell. These are caused by the production of carbon dioxide and alcohol in the process known as fermentation.

Now show the children a loaf of bread and slice it in half. What do they notice?
Ask them what they think caused the holes in bread. Keep referring to the froth on the yeast mixture and show them that when it is stirred, the bubbles disappear. Why doesn’t that happen with the bread?

Activity Two

As an introduction to bread making, read the children the story of the Little Red Hen. It illustrates beautifully the process of bread making from field to plate in order to show how cooperation can enable all to share in a reward for their combined efforts. From the book, ask the class to illustrate and label each stage of the process and display it around the class. Can they use the ideas from the book together with what they have learned to far to write instructions for the bread making process? There will be gaps but they can complete those later after the process has been completed.

Activity Three

You can also link the idea of bread making into the history topic of Invaders and Settlers.

Begin by asking the children what kinds of food invaders would eat and what kinds of food settlers would eat. Can they justify their choices with reference to how long each takes to produce? Early humans were nomadic and had a protein rich lifestyle as they killed animals from the flocks they herded or wild animals through hunting. As humans settled in hospitable areas they initially became gatherers and then found they could cultivate much of what they gathered. This meant that they would have to stay in the same place for as long as the crops took to grow and would need to spend time tending the crops during the growing season. One of the earliest cultivated crops was wheat and this was used to make bread.

Activity Four

Ask the children to bring in different kinds of bread. You may get wholemeal, granary, oatmeal, rye, soda, unleavened etc. Do an observation and taste test with them. Label headings on the board such as what it looks like, texture, size of holes/bubbles, taste, like or dislike. Be careful to check you have no celiac sufferers beforehand. Looking at the wrappers will tell them what is different about the ingredients or how it’s been cooked. From this you could discuss healthiness by looking at the nutritional information label on the bag and rank the breads in order of healthiness, deciding what it is about each bread that makes it healthy or unhealthy.

Activity Five

Making bread! Children love this and it’s easy and almost always successful. It’s even more fun when you go right back to the beginning and buy some whole wheat grains and mill them in a pestle and mortar. The children will see the white powder that is the flour and after sifting they’ll end up with nearly pure flour. This could take a very long time if you want to make all your flour this way so I’d recommend mixing some of your ground flour with commercial bread flour. At the same time you could sow some of the wheat grains in a pot or in the school garden to see how it grows.

Get the children to make us the yeast mixture as you showed them in the previous activity. It will begin frothing almost immediately and they’ll have to mix it with the flour and salt quickly. Once the dough leaves the sides of the bowl cleanly, ask the children to pick out the dough and begin kneading it. Ask them what they notice happening to the dough as they do this. The gluten in the flour is being released and making the dough stretchy. Once the dough is smooth and stretchy, put the dough back in the bowl and leave in a warm place to prove. An hour later ask the children what they notice and what has happened to the dough to make it rise. If you carefully cut a piece off using a sharp knife the children will be able to see the bubbles in the yeast. Ask them again if they can understand why the bubbles disappeared in the yeast mix yet stay in the dough. They’ll have to knead the dough again and then shape it to form their bread before proving it again. You can explain that this is to make sure the yeast and bubbles form evenly through the bread. Finally it’ll be ready for baking. Making one of your own with the children will earn you some kudos and you can use yours at the end of the activity to demonstrate the capture of the bubbles through the hardening of the dough through cooking.



Dave Lewis, Primary teacher

Primary General - Making Pizza

Pizza is a food loved by most children and careful preparation of it can mean it’s a really healthy food. Pizza can also be used as the basis for many different lessons and here are some of the ways we’ve used pizza in lessons.

Activity One

If you’re doing a topic on Romans and the food they ate, you could look at the passage from Virgil’s Aeneid 

Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”

Ask the children to think about what food might the people be eating when they eat their meal off ‘cakes of flour’ and then finally eat the plates!!

If they identify the food as pizza you could then introduce a pasty and discuss how it was used similarly by the Cornish miners. Calzone pizzas actually look similar to pasties anyway being a folded pizza with the filling inside. You could also introduce pita bread and show how a pita pocket was used similarly in middle eastern countries to hold a meal and then be consumed. In fact the word pizza is a corruption of ‘pita’. Ask if they can think of any other foods which wrap a meal in bread and they suggest sandwiches, which have an interesting history, wraps, tortillas, naan and parathas and many more!

Activity Two

Linking in pizzas to the science topic of healthy eating ask the children to tell you what food group a pizza base would belong to and then list the possible toppings that they might put on their favourite pizza.

Draw a food pyramid on the board and ask the children to add each topping to the food groups, so cheese would go in dairy, pepperoni would go in protein, tomatoi puree and tomato slices in fruit and vegetables.

Once you have completed the food pyramid of pizzas and their toppings ask the children to use it to design a balanced pizza thinking of healthy quantities. You could extend the activity by asking them to consider how the fat and salt content could be reduced or ways of improving the healthy qualities of the base.

Activity Three

Time to make our pizzas. Make sure hands and surfaces are washed beforehand and that an explanation of hygiene rules is given before they start otherwise the pizzas won’t be very healthy at all!! You could make a batch of dough beforehand for them to roll out and shape or get them to make the base themselves from flour, yeast and water. Before they add the toppings, discuss the order they go in and why that may be. Set groups of children to grate cheese, cut vegetables (care with knives). Originally there were only two types of pizza as we know them today, the marinara, named not because it had seafood on it but because it was made by fishermen’s wives and margherita, named after a visiting queen who wanted the pizza coloured in the flag of Italy, so red tomatoes, green basil and white mozzarella cheese!

Once the children have carefully made their pizzas they could be wrapped and sent home for cooking (store them in a fridge beforehand though!) or cooked and eaten in a Roman feast!

Activity Four

Pizzas are great for learning about fractions in mathematics. Using basic pizzas, cut them up into halves, quarters etc depending on the fractions being taught. You can use them very effectively to do simple fractions or to do mixed or improper fractions. Visually the children can easily identify that seven quarters make one whole and three quarters. They are also very good for doing addition and subtraction of fractions too and if you’re feeling really brave division of fractions where you might have four pizzas divided into sixths so twenty four sixths and share these between six people they’d have four sixths (or maybe visually two thirds) of a pizza each. This makes maths (and the tricky and potentially dull topic of fractions) exciting and motivational for the children and will guarantee that the lesson, and hopefully its objectives, will stay in their minds.

They can also be used in a shape and data extension by asking the children to consider why pizzas are round.

Dave Lewis, Primary teacher