History at St Christopher's

The National Curriculum for history aims to ensure that all children:

• know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
• know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind
• gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’
• understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses
• understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed
• gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

St Christopher's History Timeline

At St Christopher's we teach our history in chronological order. The main reason for this being to allow children to build up a chronological understanding of the topics they are learning and to allow them to see how they fit into our St Christopher's timeline. To help the children visualise this, we have our timeline painted in the heart of our school with the children visiting at the start of every new history topic to see where it fits in with their previous learning and whole school history journey. This has also allowed us to build our local history links into the timeline too. Each year group has their own unique timeline displayed in their classroom that shows all of the history topics they have covered so far allowing for chronological conversations to happen in class. These timelines build as the children move up the school with the year 6 timeline resembling our complete whole school timeline. 

Museum Takeover Day 2020

Takeover Day is run by 'Kids in Museums', and is an opportunity for children and young people to take over real jobs in heritage organisations for a day. Since this year it was not physically possible to visit let alone takeover, Hannah from Suffolk Archives very kindly offered for St Christopher's to take part in a virtual takeover of Suffolk Archives. Our Year 6 children worked closely with Hannah and worked on a project to coincide with Remembrance Day and their World War 1 topic. 

Hannah sent us copies of photographs of Suffolk in the First World War to investigate. The children had the opportunity to sift through the photographs, before choosing one they wanted to share with a wider audience. They had discussions, wrote notes and drew pictures to share alongside their chosen photographs. Their work can be seen on the Suffolk Archives website. 

History Club + Whole School History Afternoon

To help develop an understanding of chronological understanding, Mr Etheridge and Mrs Howlett ran a History Club for Key Stage 2 children with the help of Hannah Salisbury from the Suffolk Archives. Each week, we learnt about a different time period starting in 2010 and travelling back each week. In the final week of the club, we hosted a whole school 'History Afternoon' with the help of Hannah which involved us leading a school assembly and building a time capsule as a school which we have hidden away for the future students of St Christopher's to find in years to come. 

VE Day

75th Anniversary 

Friday 8th May 2020

What is VE Day? 

VE Day or 'Victory in Europe Day' marked the end of Europe’s involvement in the Second World War.

On Tuesday 8th May 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made an announcement on the radio at 3pm that the war in Europe had come to an end, following Germany's surrender the day before. VE day was an emotional day that millions of people had been waiting for. Many people were extremely happy that the fighting had stopped and there were big celebrations and street parties. It is important to note that this was not the end of World War Two (WW2) but it was the end of Europe's involvement in it.

The powerpoint below explains in more detail.

How did people in Suffolk celebrate?

People in Suffolk celebrated with street parties like the rest of the country. Below are some pictures from Suffolk Street parties on the original VE day in 1945. These pictures were very kindly given to us by Hannah Salisbury from the Suffolk Archives.

Here are some of our VE Day celebrations ...