Back To School With Beth

I think delivering the resources was amazing, like, they followed it. I like that it has got that sort of background stuff. The stuff about the cradle of civilization and exploring what cradle meant and those sort of ideas of beginnings. I think that’s really important because it gives them a foundational knowledge that I didn’t get, till I did my undergraduate. I did an undergraduate in archeology, and that’s the first time I heard like “Cradle of Civilization.” It’s so important they’ve got that now in year seven, they’re going to go through year eight and year nine, hopefully remembering it. And that was really important.

The poem, like all of the poems, gave me goosebumps and I could see their reactions Were really positive. They loved the multimedia. Having the pictures on the background is just so different to what they experience, and I think it’s really important that they’re experiencing a different type of history lesson. History lessons aren’t just sort of text and PowerPoints with still pictures, and actually it can be moving pictures and it could be a globe on the background. It can be sort of multimedia. There can be a poem in the middle of it, delivered really well and with some with some images For them to think about.

I think it was fantastic and it just provides another layer of history for them to explore. And I found it really positive. And I find it quite easy to go through. Like, I think one of the things I was thinking before I delivered it is, you know, “Am I going to be able to deliver it to the best of my ability?” Actually, it was really straightforward. It led them really naturally from one point to another. It had all the historical sort of points in it. So I took my interpretation, sources, significance and and I thought they followed it beautifully and I felt confident delivering it. I felt standing at the front, I was delivering another history lesson.

And that was really important to me because I wanted to be confident for them and to deliver this this really important lesson well I think they the resource achieved that definitely. I think sometimes when I plan lessons and deliver lessons, I know what’s coming and I know like, okay, I’ve got to take them here and here, whereas this was a journey that we went on together. And even though I’d seen the resources before and kind of gone through my in my head, taking it with a kind of, “we’re going to do this together, we’re going to go on this exploration, we’re going to learn about Imhotep together, and we’re going to go on an exploration.”

As a class was really, really moving and just just boosted that confidence. And I thought they got more out of it than I thought they would and I got something out of it in that I don’t think I would deliver that lesson exactly the same again with a different group. I think I would, you know, there’ll be different avenues to explore and different ideas to explore, which I think is the beauty of that resource. It’s always there. The base is there, and then you can take it in these different directions confidently because the base is there. The Imhotep lesson, for example, would be brilliant as an introduction to ‘what is history? Because it’s something that they don’t necessarily feel.

They don’t need to know all of that information for sort of like the next year, but it provides a really good grounding in interpretations and sources which they come back to again and again. So actually as a ‘what is history?’ It’s a brilliant lesson. And then looking at other resources and I was having a look on the website the other day when I was getting the Imhotep lesson, but looking at the other ones and the other ones, we can deliver. And I was already thinking like, okay, this one goes into year eight, this one goes into year nine.

This one would be brilliant for like year ten, year 12 and just kind of taking them up in the other key stages. But also in the in terms of the organization, I teach sociology as well, which is all about representation and one of the units we’re doing media representation. And actually I showed them the website the other day about positive representation, about ethnic minorities and how actually there are lots of people out there who are working on this positive representation and they’ve got that written down as an example. They sat there mock recently and they used it as their example, as positive representation of ethnic minorities.

And that was like it was something I was thinking about when I was planning that lesson. I was like, Actually, this, this isn’t just history. This is also now, this is like the social sort of aspect of life that we live in now. It’s this positive representation of the historical figures, but made by people who are out there creating these positive representations in the wider world, in media, in the classroom as well. So I think taking it into different subjects could be cool, Could be interesting.