KS1 & KS2 history curriculum

This unit uses and builds on pupils' knowledge of basic timelines, early explorers, and seafarers from key stage 1. It prepares pupils for later units that expand their understanding of archaeology, its purposes, and the way it interacts with other areas of historical study. It also prepares pupils for Year 3 units about Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, Sumer, and the Shang dynasty in China, which all feature similar stories of migration, settlement, domestication, and the various functions of ancient artwork.

1. The big picture of the earliest humans in Britain
2. The evidence of the Paleolithic Era
3. Life at the end of the last Ice Age
4. Settlement during the Mesolithic Era
5. Skara Brae and life in the Neolithic Era
6. Significant Stone Age artefacts

• Pupils should already be able to talk about events in the past and use some appropriate vocabulary to talk about the past.
• Pupils should be able to interpret a simple timeline of events in chronological order.
• Pupils should be able to identify similarities and differences between ways of life at different times.
• Pupils should understand that archaeologists and historians can interrogate artefacts to create accounts an representations of the past.