The main components of the project:
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The Book
When I have been designing this project, the core book that I come back to at every stage is the Usborne History of Britain, It is a beautiful full-colour hardbacked A4 book which weighs more than my cat and has a ribbon to mark your page, and it offers a comprehensive, detailed and easy-to-understand overview of all the main periods, which is perfect for making sure that you haven't missed anything crucial. Some double-page spreads cover 'dates and battles' type history, but many others introduce important social issues and technological changes of each time. I recommend buying this book for yourself if you want to understand the structure of British history and especially if you plan to teach it to others.
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The Timeline
To try and provide some visual context for the trips, I like to use timelines (and add post-it markers on all the places we have gone). For the first two years, the TTS Stone Age to 1066 timeline poster pack is a nice ready-made solution, but it does suffer from the ever-present issue of scale - bunching up the multiple ages before the year 0 and the thousand years after into the same distance. I also like making timelines to scale using till rolls blu-tacked onto the walls, and using the "granny scale" to indicate how many generations back the period was (e.g.: something 5 grannies ago was when your child's great-great-great-great-grandparents were young, in the mid-Victorian period).
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The Satchel
We have a very battered, rough leather satchel which could reasonably fit into most of history with a bit of imagination. At the start of each trip/new time period I fill it up with books and props which we will 'need' on our journey as a physical thing for Kane to explore. This comes in handy while travelling and staying in hotels where "shall we do something from the satchel?" can fill a quiet moment. Usually there is at least one prop which Kane can keep as a souvenir (toy) after the trip, in the age-old tradition of historical adventures in children's fiction. We happen to own quite a lot of history books (and general history 'stuff') anyway, but it's also possible to fill a satchel from your library if you request the books in advance. If you are looking for replicas of historical items, ask your local museum - most museums have (under-used) sets of loan boxes on different themes which you could borrow in exchange for a small deposit and filling out an evaluation form at the end.
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The Scrapbooks
As we go through history, we are creating a set of scrapbooks for our personal use. These are the real output of the project, as they can combine pictures, key words and concepts from me, leaflets and photos from our trips, and occasionally writing, drawing or other artwork made by Kane (I don't insist that he must sit down and write in the scrapbook every time, as the learning is primarily from the seeing and doing, rather than from reading and writing in this project). Some of the historical content I include is original and some of it is taken from the internet (e.g.: images of a particular site or an object from a museum) or from teachers' resource sites such as Twinkl.
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