Award-winning National Archives website, Learning Curve, has had a facelift. Not only does the website look great, but on top of all the fantastic teaching resources, we’ve also added even more useful features.
http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/
Go to Learning Curve and you can find:
* New indexes to make finding resources easier
* Workshop preparation materials – a completely new section to compliment our videoconferencing and onsite education workshops
* A new help section and free teacher’s booklet
And of course there are some brand new teaching resources too:
* Domesday Book: what can we learn about Britain in the 11th century?
* Elizabethan Propaganda: how did the English Government try to show that the Spanish were planning to invade England in 1588?
All of the teaching resources follow the History National Curriculum from Key Stages 2 to 5 and are completely free.
More about Learning Curve:
* We are a registered content provider for Curriculum Online
* We were voted the top ICT resource by history teachers in a recent Fisher Trust survey.
* We use the extraordinary range of documents from the National Archives collection, spanning 1000 years of British and world history, to cover multiple subjects with multiple approaches.
Students can use the Learning Curve for researching an essay, a presentation, a report, a piece of course work or an in-depth personal study. You may want to use it for exam revision or to practise your work with sources. Just choose a topic from the Index and get started.
We also have some tips for study skills and further research:
* Using primary sources
* Essay writing
* Exam revision
* A level personal study
* Activities and games
* Links for students
Teachers can include the Learning Curve in their teaching in a variety of ways, ranging from activities in the classroom to use in group work, course work, revision and research. In addition to history, the site can also be used to teach and reinforce literacy and ICT skills.
Types of Learning Curve content
Snapshots
These are lesson-sized activities, usually an inquiry with questions or tasks based on one or two individual sources. They can be used online or printed out for classroom use.
Focus On…
Focus On investigations encourage skills in handling different types of historical sources, including cartoons, documents, census material and film. Focus On Census also supports the National Curriculum element for local history study. These investigations are interactive and some include quizzes.
Exhibitions
These provide in-depth information, organised into galleries and case studies that investigate a particular question or theme related to the topic. Pupils are given guided access to primary sources and are encouraged to explore wider conclusions. They learn how to construct an argument and to support it with appropriate evidence.
Interactive tasks, games, worksheets, background information, useful notes on sources, timelines, glossaries and teacher's notes are included. Where the original source is difficult to read, we provide transcripts and sometimes simplified transcripts.
The exhibitions are inherently flexible. It is not necessary to work through a whole exhibition. According to the constraints of time and different courses, individual galleries, case studies or selected sources can be used for stand-alone activities in the classroom. They can be used for homework, group work, coursework, revision or research. You can develop your own source questions if you prefer, according to the specific needs of your pupils.
For full details of how to get the best from the Learning Curve, download our free teachers booklet.
http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/howto/teacherbooklet.htm
