History Investigators learning session

What is it like to be an historian?

This session allows students to put their history enquiry skills to the test! Students will work together as a class to find clues and uncover a mystery document together, before going on to work in small groups to explore a range of documents from the eleventh century right through to today. By honing their inference skills, they will gain confidence in analysing unfamiliar primary sources, ask questions around why certain events and people make it into the history books and consider what impact that has on how we understand the past. The session culminates with students taking on the role of the archivists and historians of today, by evaluating how their choices around which stories we choose to tell and remember will impact on how the present is remembered in the future.

Curriculum links

Pupils should:

• Regularly address and sometimes devise historically valid questions about change, cause, similarity and difference, and significance.
• Construct informed responses that involve thoughtful selection and organisation of relevant historical information
• Understand how our knowledge of the past is constructed from a range of sources

Questions about the session? Check our frequently asked questions page, or get in touch via email at tla.schools@cityoflondon.gov.uk