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.
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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.
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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 Some of the historical content I include is original and some of it is taken from the internet (eg: images of a particular object from a museum) or from teachers' resource sites such as Twinkl.
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